


No Sin But Ignorance

by yellow_caballero



Series: immortal with a kiss [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blind Character, Canon Asexual Character, Cultism and You: So Your World's Destroyed and Now You're Head Priest, Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, Everybody Lives, Gratuitous overuse of MCR lyrics, I was kind of lying with the Jon/Martin last time but I'm NOT this time, In a stunning turn around Martin is the sketchiest person whom anybody has ever met, Jon's Jesus but he's the only one who doesn't know that so everyone dunks on him, Martin Has To Fight Jon's 7 Evil Friends Before He Can Date Him, Multi, Post-apocalyptic rom-com, Sir Tiresias is a VERY good boy, So You Live In A Utopia: What Now?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 51,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23264278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: Jonathan Sims' life is perfect.His family's happy, his work as a cult leader's going great, and he might even have a cute boyfriend in the works - if the boyfriend can get past his horde of overprotective friends.It's probably best that he just doesn't think about the fact that everybody seems to know something he doesn't. That three years ago the dead rose, the world was rewritten, and that Jon's the only Avatar who forgot. That his car accident three years ago that took his sight really wasn't an accident at all.He should probably leave it alone and return to his happy life. But Jon's never been very good at that, just like he's never been very good at being happy. Maybe the answers that he seeks are too horrible to bear. And maybe happiness is only possible in ignorance.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Series: immortal with a kiss [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1672828
Comments: 54
Kudos: 386





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to the previous work in this series, 'Bell, Book, and Candle'. I recommend you read that one first - but maybe if you don't, this story is an ACTUAL mystery? Let me know how that turns out for you if you do that. 
> 
> This story was written, in part, because I found it exceptionally difficult to find a fanfic that 1) puts the character with a disability in the center of their own story, and from their own POV and 2) doesn't use the disability for hurt/comfort points. I've wanted to write a story like this for a very long time, and although I still don't think I have it down perfectly, it's the closest I've ever come. There are several discussions of ableism in this fic, although that's not what it's about, so keep an eye out for that. This story is dedicated to Twain, who is, the words of his owner, a seeing eye dog who is a VERY good boy!

_ Teenagers scare the living shit out of me! They could care less, so long as someone’ll bleed! _

Ah, Jon thought, unlocking the door to his house. Just what any thirty three year old man loves to hear upon returning home from a long day at work: the sweet, dulcet sounds of My Chemical Romance peeling the paint off the walls. 

Tim buying Gerard those speakers must have been revenge for some petty slight. Maybe he wasn’t satisfied with his performance review. Jon sighed, depositing his keys in the key dish before carefully bending down and unhooking Tiresias’ harness and hanging that up too. Tiresias barked, also happy to be free after a long day of hard work, and his wagging tail thumped against Jon’s shin before trotting off into the hallway with the click of toenails on hardwood. Doubtlessly embarking upon his eternal crusade to terrorize The Admiral, god save him. 

_ So darken your clothes and strike a violent pose! Maybe they’ll leave you alone but not me! _

“I’m home!” Jon called, folding up his cane and depositing it by the keydish before he carefully took off his shoes and stuffed his socks inside. “Turn that racket down, please!”

He stepped into the living room, unbuttoning his cuffs and slinging off his suit jacket to drape across - either that was the back of the couch or Georgie would yell at him for being messy later. He kicked it a little - yep, couch - and let himself drop onto the cushions, wriggling firmly into his butt imprint. Finally. Home at last. He was not moving until dinnertime. Not wild horses, not Jude Perry threatening to burn down his house  _ again _ , not an act of the god of your choosing would move him from this spot. He was going to turn on the TV, set it to Jeopardy, and veg out for the next three hours -

“Jon? Can you sign this for me?”

Jon sighed and opened his eyes. He had missed the scuff of feet down the staircase. “I suppose. What is it?”

“Permission slip. We’re taking a field trip to the British Museum.” Gerard dumped a large, thick book on Jon’s lap, and slapped a piece of paper over it. Far more gently, he took Jon’s hand and put a pen in it, waiting for Jon’s fingers to curl around it before guiding his hand down on the page. “Right there. Just sign.”

Jon began to grow suspicious. “I assume that this is  _ actually  _ a field trip permission form.”

“Yeah. Obviously.” Gerard, bless him, kept his voice steady and completely even. He didn’t sound guilty at all. “Just go ahead and sign, it’s no big deal.”

“Can you read it out for me?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course. It says - it says, at the top in real big letters, the school header. Name of the school and all that. Underneath, it’s all like, ‘On March 15th Mrs. Jameson’s tenth grade class is going to go on a field trip to the British Museum. Uh, bagged lunches will be...provided. That’s what it says.”

“Of course,” Jon said mildly. “Georgie will agree with that, of course.”

“Yeah. Duh.”

“So there’s no harm in waiting for her to get back from work to confirm this.”

Tellingly, Gerard was silent. 

“I am,” Jon said slowly, “ _ very impressed  _ by your willingness to lie to an  _ omniscient high priest  _ of a  _ truth knowing cult. _ I am, however, less impressed by your intelligence. I’m not even your legal guardian.”

“Come on, Jon!” Gerard cried desperately. “As if you’ve never gotten a detention slip! Georgie told me about how you spent high school! Just sign it so Georgie doesn’t find out and yell at me for two hours! Do you want to listen to Georgie yell at me for two hours? I know how annoying you think it is. Think of yourself here!”

True. Jon did find conflict annoying and stressful. And Gerard was a good kid, holistically. Very holistically. “I’ll do it if you wear headphones for your music while I’m in the house.”

“Deal,” Gerard said instantly. 

Well, it probably wasn’t the Good Parent thing to do, but that’s why Jon was the uncle. He signed the paper with a flourish, hopefully keeping it mostly on the line - he had a device at his desk that aligned his pen so he could sign forms, but it was at his desk - and handing it back to Gerard, who practically ripped it out of his hands. 

“Thanks, you’re the best evil priest dad ever, I’m going back upstairs, bye!” Gerard said hurriedly, before stomping back up the stairs to, presumably, return to whatever dark bidding goth teenagers do alone in their rooms. 

“Do you want to watch Jeopardy with me?” Jon called, as he heard Gerard’s footsteps retreating. “I won’t even tell you how many goats Alex Trebeck sacrificed to the Eye last week!”

“No thanks!” Gerard called back. “You’re insufferable to watch Jeopardy with, and you know it! You yell out  _ every  _ answer!”

Okay. He did do that. Jon shrugged, as he heard Gerard’s door slam. He settled back into the couch, lying down and kicking his feet up. “Alexa, please turn the television on. Alexa, go to Netflix. Alexa, play Jeopardy.”

The  _ other  _ omnipresent eavesdropper into Jon’s life chimed happily and started playing Jeopardy, which at the end of the day really was the important thing. 

And knowing the answer to the question  _ improved  _ the experience,  _ thank you.  _

As usual, as he did every afternoon, Jon listened to episodes of Jeopardy until he started to drift off and, eventually, doze off into a light sleep. Gerard called him an old man whenever he did it, conking out in front of game shows every afternoon, but he didn’t live for the approval of teenagers. The only thing that permeated his sleepy haze was Tiresias barking at The Admiral, which hissed back. 

He thought, hazily, of Martin. As expected, he was a very good employee. Despite his...strange interview, and the way that Michael had almost chased him off with a broom, he acclimated into the Archives as if he had been working there for years. And it usually took a very long time before anybody acclimated to the Archives. He had been working with them for about a week now, and it was like he had always been there. 

Technically, Jon knew objectively, he had been there for much longer than a week. But that was one parcel of information Jon hadn’t fully processed, and that still confused him more than he liked, so he tried not to think about it too hard. All he needed to know was that Martin was a friend, a true friend, the kind only forged by extreme adversity. And that the adversity...may or may not have happened. 

It wasn’t a totally uncommon occurrence for the entire world to lose memory and all records of an event. February 14th this year had been cancelled by The Lonely, disappointing many young lovers. Nobody remembered a single thing that occurred that day. So, not completely out of the realm of imagination, but still worrying. This was more than a single day’s worth of events. It was more like a life. 

Did Jon have a secret, unknown life that he had simply forgotten? If he had, it was probably for the best. From what little he could glean of it, it was probably best left forgotten. Even if there were some good parts in it, like Martin, he had forgotten it for a reason. Jon had learned that lesson the hard way - that sometimes a decision was made for your own good, even if you didn’t know why or how, and that not every question needed an answer. Sometimes the act of asking was enough. 

He had the impression that Martin remembered more than he did. Maybe it even subconsciously impacted his decision to apply at the Archives. Well, he would learn soon enough. Most did, eventually. 

The world softened, and awareness faded. Jon experienced a flurry of impressions, voices whispering in his ear, the strange knowledge that something was happening. He dreamed - dreamed? experienced? remembered? - that he was inside the Archival library, familiar hum of the air conditioner thumping in his ears, fingers brushing over paper Statements. He was deeply absorbed in the Statement, recording it out to the whirring tape recorder, when he saw Martin walk inside in nothing but a t-shirt and pants. Martin looked startled, then mortified. 

But it was strange. Jon  _ knew  _ this had happened, the same way that strange things happened in dreams and your mind filled in the context. He knew the way Martin blushed red. But he had no idea what Martin looked like. He could ask the Beholding, as he did sometimes when he needed the image of something, but more and more often the images it would send him were blurry and strange, just an abstract jumble of shapes that made little sense to him, and more frequently it was useful just to receive a description. Jon hadn’t dreamed in images in years, and never of things he had never seen. This must be a memory, a precious forgotten memory, and Jon reached out for it as he tried to pin it down, desperately drinking in the way Martin looked surprised and embarrassed, but the tighter he held it down the quicker it slipped through his fingers, like running water, and soon it was gone completely -

“Family! I’m home! Oh hullo, Terry! Who’s a good boy?”

Jon startled awake, barely awake he had fallen asleep. He felt himself on the couch again, hearing the faint sounds of Tiresias barking and Georgie cooing over him as if he was a rambunctious pet, named  _ Terry.  _ Disgraceful nickname. 

He struggled to recall the dream, and failed. Martin hadn’t been wearing trousers...wasn’t it you who was supposed to be giving presentations in just your pants? How weird. He heard Georgie scuff her feet against the floor as she walked into the living room, Tiresias frolicking around her as she gave him vigorous pets. Why had he been dreaming about Martin? The last thing he wanted was to accidentally start dreamwalking again. Those had been an exhausting few months. 

“My darling husband, sprawled on the couch again like a layabout. You should be ashamed.” Despite her words, Jon felt her lean over and give him a kiss on the forehead. He sighed and sat up a little to kiss her on the top of her head too. “Jeopardy again? At least watch the news.”

“Please. I get enough of current events at work. Also, still your housemate.” God, get called an old married couple  _ one time  _ by Elias, a joke that was not even funny coming from the man with five divorces, and suddenly it’s Georgie’s favorite joke. “Whose turn is dinner?”

“Yours and Gerry’s, delightfully. Which means that I get the TV! Scooch over, buddy.”

Jon sighed dramatically and stood up from the couch, letting Georgie drop onto his precious butt imprint and change the channel. She put on Teen Wolf, making Jon roll his eyes, and he whistled for Tiresias. The dog barked once in acknowledgement and went ‘back to work’, so to say, standing in attention at Jon’s side and carefully poking his hand when he almost ran into the doorway on his way to the kitchen. 

“Gerry!” He heard Georgie call from the living room. “Your turn for dinner! Get down here!”

More thumps down the stairwell, and Jon sighed as he carefully bent down and found a pot. He ran a finger along the insides, making sure that it was completely clean, and settled it onto the stove. He heard the sounds of Georgie asking Gerry about his day in the living room, Gerry apparently lying, before being ushered into the kitchen. 

“If you’re busy with homework, I can take care of dinner today,” Jon said. He settled the water level and the hot water indicator in the pot, filling it with water and waiting for the level indicator to beep before he took it off. “We’re doing spaghetti, garlic bread, and frozen pizza. If you want to go work on your essay instead…?”

“I can help with dinner,” Gerry said quickly. The lengths teenagers go to in order to get out of homework. “I’ll preheat the oven. And cut the garlic bread!”

“Nobody ever lets me use a knife,” Jon groused. “Cut off your fingertip one time…”

“You need those fingertips!” Georgie called from the living room. 

Their kitchen was fastidiously organized, with every container holding both a braille label and put back in the same place every time, and despite the way Georgie complained and Gerry panicked Jon was very capable of chopping vegetables. He was far from an expert cook, but Jon liked to consider himself not half bad. Spaghetti was hardly the peak of his culinary expertise, though. The only thing cooking that Jon didn’t like to mess with was hot oil, and he typically let Georgie do all their frying. 

But beyond that, it was a good way to get some face time with Gerry. Teenagers were always holed up in their rooms or hanging out with their friends, but this was one thing that Gerry was always willing to do with him. Besides, he liked helping. Lately he had been enthusiastically offering to drive Jon places, which would have been more useful if they didn’t live in London and cars were necessary. Gerry would never say as much, but Jon suspected that he enjoyed the way Jon and Georgie would harange him into spending time with him. 

Sure enough, after a second where Gerry set set up the oven, he said, “Want to hear about the book I’ve been reading? David Foster Wallace is, like, such a genius.”

“Infinite Jest? That was one of my favorites in college.”

The most typical night there was for the three of them. It was, in fact, what most days were like. Most nights. Day in and day out, this simple and uncomplicated happiness. Georgie’s show was rising in popularity each year, and she was in talks with a few colleagues to co-host a recurring YouTube series on the Watcher Network (no relation, presumably, but Ryan was a public and devout Eye cultist, even if Shane was a conscientious objector to religion). Jon had tenure and Gertrude hadn’t bothered to cut his ridiculously bloated pay from where Elias had been stuffing it in a futile attempt to make Jon stop being annoying. Gerry was seeing his father more and more, increasingly comfortable with the idea of having a parent at all, and hopefully within the year Eric would be able to win custody full time. 

Life was never perfect. Life didn’t work like that. Work was stressful, his boss was a terror, and Netflix desperately needed to upgrade its catalogue of audio description shows because he was running out. But he had been coasting along on routine and regularity for years, and something had shaken him up. Jostled just out of alignment, like a piece of furniture jolted just right of where Jon expected it to be, Jon felt out of place. Uncomfortable. 

What had changed? Only one thing: Martin Blackwood.

“This is all Martin’s fault,” Jon said suddenly, feeling strongly as if he had said the sentence a thousand times before. 

Gerry had served the food as Jon sat down, and Georgie filled Jon’s plate for him. The spaghetti was hot and steaming, and the garlic bread was crispy and soft in Jon’s mouth. The soft clack and scrapes of forks against plates, and of Gerry’s unfortunate slurping, grounded him against the sudden deja vu. Why did everything, at all times, feel like Martin’s fault?

“Who’s Martin?” Georgie asked, blowing noisily on her pasta. 

That stopped Jon short. He hadn’t mentioned? He could have sworn...but no, perhaps not. Georgie was never overly interested in his work. She said it made her head hurt. “The new hire,” Jon said, instead of a thousand things. “I mentioned that, I think.”

“Oh, him! The lad who Michael hates because he made you cry?”

Trust Georgie to always know the gossip. She was blackmailing half their HOA. It helped that she had...relations with half of Britain’s spiritual authorities. Those people knew everything. Jon was fully aware that most would assume that she knew all the gossip because she lived with the Eye’s High Priest, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. 

“He didn’t make me cry,” Jon said sullenly, stabbing his fork into the pasta. “We just...had a moment.”

“A moment?” Gerry said urgently. “What kind of moment?”

“Just...a moment! I don’t know!” Jon urgently ate his pizza. “It’s nothing. Off day for the both of us. He’s a good employee. Even if he’s immediately earned the ire of his coworkers.”

“Does Eric like him?” Gerry asked. “He likes everybody, it seems.”

“Eric says he’s creepy.”

“Does Eric know that you’re all cultists?” Georgie asked. 

“I’m not sure he’s cottoned on, honestly. He keeps on commenting on how strange the decor is.”

“He’s so goddamn stupid,” Gerry muttered tragically. “I need a parent with a brain cell.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Jon asked, faux wounded. 

“At least chopped liver tastes good,” Georgie teased. “You’re just a layabout. Speaking of, guess who’s coming back into town next Friday!” Before Jon could open his mouth and call upon his godly powers to give her the answer, she knew better and barrelled past him. “Tim and Sasha! They’re crossing through London and want to visit us! They said that they have something they want to tell us. We absolutely must have a dinner party. We can invite Basira and Daisy, and obviously Melanie. It’ll be just like old times.”

“That’s lovely.” Despite himself, and despite the way that Tim told Jon only half-jokingly that if he ever saw him again he would strike him down, Jon found a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “We should order the congratulations on the engagement cake immediately, so it’ll be ready in time.”

Silence stretched across the table. Jon realized his misstep. 

“In my defense,” he said hastily, “They have something special to tell us? What else could they possibly have meant? I think I simply used my deductive skills -”

“She could have been pregnant,” Georgie said sullenly, knowing he was right, unwilling to admit it. At least, that was Jon’s interpretation. “I didn’t want to assume. They never even officially announced being together.”

“Georgie, even I noticed. Romantically speaking, I am the most oblivious man on earth.”

“And blind,” Gerry input, as if any of them had forgotten. 

“Astute observation. If even I noticed, they weren’t trying very hard to keep it a secret.” Jon delicately nibbled on some garlic bread. “Tim’s always worn his heart on his sleeve. Martin’ll be excited, at least, he always loves office romances. Maybe he’ll bake some lemon squares.”

“Does Martin know Tim and Sasha?”

Oh. He didn’t. They had never met. “Sorry. Of course he doesn’t. I got - turned around. Do you want to do decorations? If it’s too fancy Daisy will leave, so we should keep it tasteful.”

The subject change wasn’t subtle, but Georgie went along with it anyway. She had slowly been growing better at learning not to pry. It had been a learning curve for them both: after the fifth time, years ago, when she asked him if he was  _ really  _ okay, or if he was just, like,  _ faking it _ , Jon had blown up at her and refused to talk to her or let her help him with anything for days. Tact and gentleness hadn’t come easily to her, but everybody had to grow up sometime. Maybe it had been unfair on Jon’s behalf as well. He had simply been growing very sick of everybody acting like he had died. 

At least, she dropped it for a while. Georgie cleaned up as Jon helped Gerry with his homework, and after he finished they all played a quick game of Scrabble. They had a truly stunning number of raised tiling or braille board games, but that was because both Jon and Georgie loved board games and, weirdly enough, so did Gerry. He was an odd one. Jon had never seen him so much as touch a video game. He was like an old man locked in an acne ridden body. 

But after Gerry retreated to his room to talk with his internet friends and Jon was left sitting on the balcony, leaning against the railing and enjoying the fresh air on his face as he snuck a cigarette, he heard the sliding door open and close. A soft blanket draped itself over his shoulders, and he let Georgie lean her head against his shoulder. They stood there in silence like that for a while, Georgie looking over the high end neighborhood as Jon felt the smoke drag itself through his lungs. He knew exactly what it was doing to his body, but they all needed vices. You went insane otherwise. 

“Does the world ever feel wrong to you?” Jon asked suddenly. “As if your life is another person’s life, and you’re just walking in their shoes? Like you’re going to wake up any second and be back where you used to be?”

Georgie just hummed, her curls brushing his shoulder. She really was very short, and they had always looked so strange standing next to each other: him a giant scarecrow, all gaunt angles and sharp lines, and Georgie barely five foot two, curvy and soft. 

“I am standing on the balcony of my several million pound house in London with my ex-boyfriend, current best friend housemate who happens to be an extremely powerful figure in the religious scene. I own and run an independent, successful show, I have a gorgeous and wonderful girlfriend, am looking after a lovely foster son, and my roller derby team is killing it. Jon, I have no fucking clue how this is my life.”

“How did we even afford this house?” Jon wondered out loud, treading down an excruciatingly familiar path. 

“The last time we had this conversation you asked the Eye over it and it said, verbatim, ‘Don’t worry about it’. So don’t worry about it.” Georgie squeezed his arm. “You’re deflecting. You deflected during dinner. We talked about this.”

“I’m allowed not to talk about things,” Jon said sullenly. 

“Yep. But I’m allowed to ask when it’s something that might, possibly, become my problem in the future. Or when it’s Creepy Magic Shit. And I feel like this is both.”

Jon was silent, chewing her words over. Was it creepy magic shit? Would it be a problem? Most creepy magic shit became a problem eventually. Nothing was free. Jon knew that better than anybody. The art of the deal and all that. 

Slowly, because some things were inexplicable to those who had not sold their lives to an all-seeing god, Jon said, “I knew Martin. Before.”

“Before the accident? No you didn’t. I have your entire contacts list on my phone.”

It hadn’t been an accident, but that was what they called it.. 

Still, she wasn’t kidding about the contacts list. He wasn’t sure why she had felt the need to do that, beyond her newfound and bizarre protective streak. “I think I did! He was in my life, Georgie. I knew him! He was important to me. I just...forgot.” Shamefully, Jon’s voice cracked a little. “Georgie, I know what he  _ looks  _ like. He’s all...soft looking.”

She hugged him tightly, and Jon let her. “Have you asked the Eye?”

“It’s why I know that I knew him at all. But the details...it was quite a bit. And you know that downloads too big aren’t good for me.” He grimaced, and he knew that Georgie was too. He got weird when he asked the Eye for too much information. Bad weird. Trauma eating weird. “I shouldn’t worry about this. It’s not worth worrying about. If Martin wishes to...rekindle the relationship we once had, that’s that. I don’t need to know what happened between us. It’s not important.” 

There were four other senses to experience someone with, after all. What was vision? It was a liar, and Jon didn’t abide liars. Truly, really and genuinely, the vast majority of the time Jon held no desire to have to remember a thousand faces or shapes. It was the sensation of loss that was getting to him now. 

“It sounds important to you,” Georgie said firmly. “Try becoming friends with him again. Don’t let this weird shit get in the way of that. If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen. You have to trust that.”

“I have no choice,” Jon said, “do I?”

“Go to bed, honey.” Georgie reached up and kissed his cheek, likely standing on her tiptoes. “Want to bunk with me tonight? It’ll be a sleepover.”

Went unsaid was that he usually only bunked with her these days when Melanie wasn’t there, and when his nightmares were unusually bad. Endless dreams, for years on years, of cold fingers ripping out his eyes...they had receded eventually, but sometimes Jon still felt the phantom tingle of fingers reaching behind his optic nerve and  _ yanking.  _

That wasn’t what had happened, of course. They were still there, sitting uselessly in his head and needing occasional cleaning, with a neatly severed optic nerve. Zero visibility, which was actually somewhat uncommon. Absolutely zero chance of ever getting the vision back. The doctors had been baffled, called it almost surgical. Impossible. 

They had all been mystified, until Elias had sat by his bedside at the hospital. Jon liked to imagine the incongruity of it: Elias’ soft grey wool suits standing out harshly among the small scattering of get well cards. 

He hadn’t minced words. You know this was no accident, he had said. This is your payment, he had said. He had wanted to know what Jon had bought, what he could have possibly bought that had freed Elias of the Eye. I can’t read your mind, Elias had said, and sounded almost - scared. Furious. Both? Neither? 

Neither he nor Georgie, who hadn’t left Jon’s side, knew what the fuck he was talking about. But things had changed after that: Elias had quit, shocking everybody, and promoted Gertrude to his old position and Jon to Gertrude’s old one. The reshuffling had shown up even in Jon’s own department: his fellow archival assistants had all quit quickly after that, for some reason or another. Not all at once - Tim and Melanie had turned in their resignations before he had even heard about the wreck, Sasha following a few weeks afterwards, and Daisy and Basira had only hung around long enough to train Gertrude’s picks for the new assistants before they peaced out too. At the time Jon had assumed that none of them had wanted to deal with him as a boss, but they all had taken advantage of their complete unemployment to camp out in Jon’s hospital room. 

Maybe everyone had been freed. Not that any assistant couldn’t quit whenever they wanted now, of course, it was just that few did. Maybe everyone had been freed but Jon. Was that another thing he had sold? What had he gotten in return?

At least Elias had felt bad enough for harassing a hospital patient that he bought him Tiresias. That was, like, one of two nice things Elias had ever done for him. Almost made up for all of the crass and, frankly, just awkward DUI jokes Peter had made. 

Jon had been  _ sober.  _ He had been sober. He had -

“Sure,” Jon said, exhausted, and let Georgie guide him back to bed. 

  
  
  


It wasn’t until the next morning, when Jon had silenced his unfairly happily chirping talking alarm clock that read out six am in a melodious voice, when he had used his little laser gun to meticulously check the colors on all of the clothing that he was wearing that day, when he robotically ate the cereal in his bowl, when he had gotten so bored on the tube to work that he ended up consuming some random guy’s story about the death of his father, that he remembered Peter. 

Of course! Martin had mentioned that he had worked with the Lonely. The Lonely pulled this type of shit all the time, that’s why they were all so insufferable. Yes, yes, the Eye and the Lonely were old allies, yes, yes, Elias and Peter were very happily married, whatever. All he had to do was ask the Lonely for Martin’s employment records - call it checking his references - and finally see this mysterious Martin’s real backstory. 

A niggling voice sounding in his heard that sounded a lot like Georgie reminded him that Jon didn’t do well with mysteries. He tended to get - well, a bit obsessed. But he wasn’t going to do that this time! He was going to react in a very normal, ordinary way, and not be invasive or weird or unsettling. A little bit of light reference checking, like a normal boss does. 

He was safely ensconced in his office before he courageously dialed the number. He had set up the number to come in as Blocked ID, which would improve the chances of the other person picking it up. Jon was well aware of the effect he had on people, especially this person. 

The phone rang for a long time, and Jon kicked up his feet on the desk and entertained himself by Seeing the hijinks his assistants were getting up to. Emma was doing her ‘I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed, but actually I’m mad’ voice at Michael over him messing up some files, Eric was pretending not to listen in on the Drama, and as the new guy Martin was actively attempting not to get involved. Hilarious. He loved his own personal sitcom. He missed their old lineup - Tim and Melanie are the two most interesting people to spy on in the entire world - but he liked his own assistants a lot too. 

Finally, the line was picked up. A familiar cranky and ridiculously posh voice sounded over the line. “Hello?”

Oh, but Jon could just smell how upset he was that he no longer instantly knew who was on the other line. He couldn’t fight a grin. “Hullo, Elias. Good morning! Or is it the afternoon, in sunny Crete? You better schedule your beach time carefully, I hear it’s going to rain soon.”

“Jon,” Elias said, both managing to sound as if he hated Jon’s guts personally and as if Jon was a particularly disobedient puppy who piddled on the carpet again. “I’m going to ignore this gross invasion of privacy -”  _ Quite rich _ , Elias. “ - and hope that you’re interrupting my retirement for an actual reason.”

Aww, was little baby upset that there was no vacation spot on Earth he could flee to that was safe from Jon’s Knowledge? Jon found himself grinning. Elias was fun to needle, and they both occupied a strange space in each other’s orbits. Not close to like at all, but somewhere out of the realm of hate. Like a cousin you detested, but who you always huddled with at family get togethers to shit talk everybody else. It felt as if they had known each other for far longer than they did. A lifetime, maybe. 

“What if I just wanted to say hi?” Jon said sweetly. “We miss you at the office so much. Did you know Tim and Sasha are engaged? The joys of young love and successful partnerships! How long ago was your first marriage, Elias? One hundred fifty years ago or two hundred? Must have seemed like only yesterday. Do you have any successful relationship tips for them I can pass on?”

“Rich talk from the thirty three year old man who’s living with his ex girlfriend,” Elias said flatly. “Put on your dating app profile that you won’t notice if the other person has a grotesque facial deformity, that’ll find you some matches.”

“Elias, I make it a professional habit never to match with ex-bosses on Tinder,” Jon said cheerfully. “But that reminds me! Can you put Peter on the phone? I have some professional business I want to talk about with him.”

“He’s in the shower.”

“He’s right next to you, reading a book about orphaned baby pandas and chuckling lightly to himself. You’re both sitting in a Greek coffee shop, making everyone else in the building feel insecure. And he’s been listening in on this entire conversation, so let him know that it’s regarding a certain man who walked into my office a few weeks back.”

“What’s the name of this mystery man?” Elias asked, half-bored and clearly half-resentful that he couldn’t just pluck the answer from Jon’s mind. Jon still had to ask about that, the way Elias always grumbled about not having powers he never seemed to have in the first place. At least...not that Jon could recall. 

“Martin Blackwood? Kinda girly voice, I hear he’s short and fat and Chinese? Ring any bells?”

Silence over the line. Jon began to have a bad feeling. 

After a long, excruciating pause, Elias muttered under his breath, “Of  _ fucking  _ course I’m dealing with this shit again.”

“Uh?” Jon said. 

“He didn’t want a job, did he?”

“He did, in fact,” Jon said, bewildered. 

“And you gave it to him.” Jon had the distinct sense that Elias was pinching the bridge of his nose. “Fire him, now. He’ll burn down the Archives the next time you upset his delicate little feelings.”

“Do you know each other?” Jon asked, fascinated. But that made sense, didn’t it? If Martin used to work at the Archives, then he worked there while Elias was still head. But it was rare for Elias to hold a grudge, at least so publically. He had barely blinked when Melanie threatened to stab him all those times. “Did he used to work here? He said that used to work for the Lonely, but I got the sense that -”

“Oh, fuck this. Peter, dear, you deal with this shit. I’m ordering some wine.”

Then the phone rustled, and the line fuzzed ominously, and Jon heard the faint but excruciatingly familiar sounds of bickering before a deeper, more masculine, but also somehow far more incel-ey voice came on the line. “Jon! How’s the wife and kid?”

“Still not my wife, still not my kid.”

“Must be nice,” Peter said (faux?) wistfully. “Having a life partner like that. Someone to treasure you, forever. Always look after you. Always be on your side. And children! How they’re the light of any parent’s life. It’s all just so wonderful. Imagine how people feel when it’s taken away. Did you know that more than half of my adherents have experienced the loss of a close loved one? Wouldn’t you say, Jon, that’s it’s better to never have loved at all?”

It was nice to know that Peter, at least, never changed. He was insufferable to talk to for two months after every divorce, at which point he would either find a new boytoy or get back together with Elias. “That’s nice, Peter. Do you know a Martin Blackwood? He’s a new employee who put you as a reference when he applied as an assistant at the Institute.”

Peter hummed. “Sure, I know him.”

Silence. 

“...did he work for you?”

“In a sense, yeah.”

“And what sense is that,” Jon said, wanting to die. 

“Metaphysical, mostly.”

“Great. Fantastic talking to you again, Peter. Have a lovely vacation. Enjoy Greece. Can you put Elias back on the phone?”

“Do you have any idea how difficult my life is since you stole my powers?” Peter said, completely ignoring him. “It’s terrible. I can’t just randomly show up places anymore. I can’t toss people into lonesome hell pits whenever they’re rude to me. All I have is my good looks, my billions of pounds, my upper class upbringing and lifestyle, and my position as Avatar - are we calling them Head Priests now? - of the Lonely, destined to bring solitude to this world. It’s awful. What’s the point of anything if I can’t -”

Jon hung up on him. 

Well, that was a waste of time. Peter and, indeed, most Avatars (which was slightly less hokey than Head Priest) seemed to resent Jon for something he had done to them. Power stealing, as they always put it. Jude Perry had punched him the first time she had met him, but she ended up laughing and buying him a beer too, so there were some very mixed signals. But what had he done? 

It was possible that, in this mysterious bargain that Elias had alluded to that Jon had no memory of, he had sold away his eyesight to take away some...superpowers or whatever of the other Avatars. Except that made no sense. Why would he do that? He didn’t care if Peter could teleport or not. Most of them seemed just a little happier without their powers, anyway. 

At least he knew that Martin was...well, not what he said he was, but probably not lying either. The real person to ask about this would be Gertrude, but Jon was loathe to bother her over non-work related business. He didn’t think he’d ever had a personal conversation with her. Ever. 

Jon rested his elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers. It would be easy enough to find out Martin’s personal history through research, and if necessary even compulsing him. The Eye might be of great help, but if it sent him a ridiculously huge package again he wouldn’t be able to process it. Time to investigate the old fashioned -

Ugh! What was he doing! He probably looked like a supervillain! Jon grunted, disgusted with himself, and pulled up a statement on his computer as he slid on his headphones. No more mysteries. No more top secret investigations. Jon was going to be a completely normal fucking person about his newest employee, whose personal life was none of his buisness. The same way he has respected Eric’s privacy about his family drama, and Michael’s privacy when he kept on insisting that he didn’t actually smoke weed, and Emma’s privacy about...everything, actually. He was going to be  _ normal  _ about this. 

Jon reached over and flipped on a cassette tape, which he always supernaturally seemed to be able to locate. It was a bit cumbersome reading out loud after the screenreader, but he was the only employee who could handle a quantity of Statements as high as they needed to get through each day. Just typing them up didn’t take the same level of energy. Besides, it  _ was  _ in the job description. 

“I will be  _ normal  _ about this,” Jon whispered to himself, and from his cushion in the corner Tiresias barked a sleepy agreement. 

He worked, answered phone calls, suffered through Gertrude’s curt emails, and took a live statement from a panicked college student who had been informed through a prophetic dream that if she shared her story with the Institute then she would get an A on her next math test. Lunchtime slowly rolled around, and manifested when Eric knocked on his door and popped into his office, telling him that they were all going downstairs into the cafeteria to eat. Jon was not allowed to beg off joining them, despite his best attempts half the time. They were all very firm about it - Jon suspected that Basira had included an entire chapter in her homebrew training manual that if Jon worked too long he got weird, and if Jon got weird then everyone was about to have a bad time. 

“Eric,” Jon said, waiting with him for the elevator that Georgie had delighted in forcing Elias to install. “Is the new employee settling in alright?”

“Blackwood?” Eric asked, seemingly surprised. “Yeah, sure. Quiet bloke. Got your bonkers organization system down in two seconds flat. Kinda squirrely, though.”

The elevator beeped, and the doors ground open. Jon carefully stepped inside, letting Eric press the downwards button. “It’s Gertrude’s, so blame her. Squirrely, huh…”

Jon was lost in thought the entire way to the cafeteria, Tiresias gently steering him whenever he was about to bump into something. He had the path well memorized, and generally didn’t bother to bring his cane for a journey just to the cafeteria. Once they entered the oppressively loud room, ringing with scrapes of cheers and loud conversation, Eric helped Jon sit down at their usual table, Jon gave Eric his badge, and Eric left to go get their food. 

Nobody had announced themselves when he sat down, so he guessed that Michael and Emma were also getting their food. Jon sat, bored, doing his best not to listen in on others conversations and trying as hard as he could to avoid thinking about any more mysteries. Where was Martin, anyway? Was he upstairs working still, or was he eating with them?

A little invasion of privacy couldn’t hurt. Jon focused hard, stretching his mind, and was promptly informed that Martin was sitting by himself in the corner of the cafeteria, eating a sandwich and reading an article on his phone. Jon was promptly very offended that he wasn’t eating with them. The Archival employees always ate together, they creeped everyone else out. That had been the case since his very first day here. 

Adventure it was, then. Jon stood up, grabbing Tiresias’ harness, and wished that he had brought his cane after all. He stretched his mind, memorizing how many steps forward and right it would take to get to the table - unlimited knowledge by request sure was helpful - and carefully walked forward, counting his steps under his breath and hoping everybody here recognized the sight of him well enough to get out of his way. 

It wasn’t until he bumped his hip into a table that he heard a very familiar squeak and a very familiar voice. “Jon! Mr. Sims, I mean - Jon, can I help you? I’m sorry, I didn’t even see you there!”

“May I sit down?” Jon asked politely, already sweeping his hand in search of a chair. Directly across from Martin’s voice - yes, Tiresias was pulling in this direction. 

“Yeah! Uh, the chair’s at your six o clock - right, the dog’s got it.”

“Tiresias.” Jon gingerly sat down, quietly proud of himself for navigating such a crowded space by himself. It reminded him unfavorably of those weeks at rehab, of training self-reliance by the occupational therapist abandoning him in the middle of a crowded mall and letting him find his own way back to the front. He had a panic attack, like, three times. “His name is Tiresias. He’s a very good boy.”

Silence, then quickly, “He definitely is. Sorry, Jon, is there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

Yes, everything. No, nothing. Jon just wanted to talk to him. Jon had a thousand questions. I thought you ought to know that I tend to obsess over mysteries and you’re the biggest mystery I’ve ever had. Instead of any of that, Jon just said, “The Archival employees usually sit together. You should join us.”

“I know,” Martin said, with simple surety and an odd sadness. “I - er, don’t mind. I mean, if you think I should, sure, but…”

But why waste this chance? This was the first time they’ve been alone, or close enough to it, since Martin’s interview. Jon couldn’t help but lean in a little, lowering his voice. “You know? Because you used to work here?”

“I - yeah, in a sense?” Martin sounded exceptionally unsure of this. “Jon, how much do you remember of - all of that?” 

“All of what?”

“Your  _ life _ .”

“This is my life,” Jon said sharply, but before he could say anything else he picked out Michael’s signature squawking from across the room. 

“You  _ lost  _ him!”

“He’s not a puppy,” Emma said, as monotone as usual. “He probably just went to the bathroom. He can do that by himself.”

“This is weird,” Eric said, anxious despite himself. “It’s not like him to wander off in the middle of the cafeteria without even having eaten.”

“Oh my god he got kidnapped,” Michael said, sounding desolate. “We’re such bad assistants. I don’t want to rescue him from Mike Crew, the inferior Mike, again.”

“Jesus christ,” Jon muttered. “I have five mother hens.” Slightly louder, he said, “Martin, can you get the attention of Michael? I’m afraid I left my table without a hall pass.”

“Oh. Oh!” Martin’s chair scraped. “I’ll be right back. Unless you want me to bring you back there? I mean, not that I need to bring you anywhere, but -”

“You’re awkward,” Jon said bluntly. “Just tell them to bring my food over here. I need to talk to you in private.”

“I thought you came over here to try and get me to be social.” Martin snorted lightly. “How the turn tables, Jonathan Sims.”

“What?” Jon was plenty social. Not voluntarily, but social. “Whatever. Fine. We’ll talk after lunch. But you should sit with everyone. It’s not good to be lonely.”

“This has been a very surreal week,” Martin said, almost to himself. 

“Jon! Blackwood!” So Michael had found them. Jon sighed, standing up from his chair and gesturing for Martin to stand up too. When Michael spoke again, his voice sounded closer. “Jon, why did you run off? We thought Jude had set fire to the kitchens again. Are we sitting here today?”

“No, I just came over to invite Martin to sit with us,” Jon said. “Emma’s right. I could have just been in the bathroom.”

“Ah, but you weren’t. I have a second sense for when you’re walking off cliffs. Can I take your arm, Jon?”

Jon sighed, and extended his own arm for Michael to gently loop his through and guide him back to the table. Tiresias trotted easily at Jon’s feet, and he had to assume that Martin was bringing up the rear. 

By the time that he sat back down in his seat, feeling like a bit of an idiot for not just waiting ten minutes for Michael to bring Martin over, Eric and Emma were already locked in a debate about whether or not Statement number whatever was a complete liar or if the Buried had extended towards giving people asthma attacks. 

Michael quietly told Jon what was on his plate - pasta and chicken with corn, arranged counterclockwise - as Martin took his seat next to Jon, still quiet. 

“I’ve read the Dust Bowl statements, same as you,” Emma was saying, frustrated. “Being able to breathe is an essential part of it. The statement giver spent half of it talking about how it felt to have your lungs fill up with mud.”

“But asthma doesn’t crush you,” Eric was arguing. “The crushing is essential. Remember the Underground statement, with the girl who wasn’t afraid of it? She was dirty, but it wasn’t going inside her. The fear is in being lost underground forever.”

“I couldn’t go on the Underground for a week after that Statement,” Michael said sadly. 

“It’s a miracle those Dust Bowl blokes survived,” Emma muttered. “The fellow who almost choked to death on dust pneumonia or something was in the hospital for months.”

“But he died,” Martin said, confused. “Didn’t he?”

Conversation stopped short.

“You’ve read the Statement?” Emma asked flatly. “Why? We haven’t pulled out that one in years.”

“You must be mistaken,” Michael said, far more gently. “Everybody in that statement survived just fine. The statement giver, the partner, and the farmer were a little worse for wear, but ultimately unharmed. The Buried isn’t really in the habit of killing people!”

“It’s not?” Martin asked, confused. “Isn’t that all it does? I suppose there was the incident with the security guard and Salasea, but the Buried’s mortality rate is pretty high...”

Awkward silence stretched. 

“You’ve only been here for a week, Blackwood,” Emma said, bluntly but not unkindly. “You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

“Oh...okay?”

A surprising mistake to make, for someone who claimed to have been doing studies into the Entities for so long. To imagine that the Entities killed people! How would they feed, if they killed every sheep they sheared? It just wasn’t good human husbandry. 

The conversation turned to something else soon enough, basic conversation about the latest television show that Jon never bothered keeping up with, and once attention turned away from them Jon gently elbowed Martin in the side.

“I talked to Elias, the old head of the Institute, and his husband Peter this morning,” Jon said lowly. 

“Elias?” Martin squeaked. “Why would you talk to him? He’s still alive? Not, like - decomposed?”

“Looking very spry for a two hundred year old,” Jon agreed wryly. Jon decided not to go into detail about the  _ other  _ Elias Bouchard running around, whose body had been stolen by Jonah Magnus years ago but had managed to revitalize himself. Good for him. Weird bloke. “He really seemed to hate you. Funny, for someone who’s apparently never met you before. Said something about setting the Archives on fire?”

“That was  _ one  _ time, and it was an  _ emergency.  _ Also partly your idea!”

“Please go back to the time you set the Archives on fire and explain that one to me.”

“I shan’t. It was only a few statements. Not a big deal. I checked, anyway, and the statements are back. Like I never even burned them.” Martin’s voice quieted. “But a lot of things are back, as if they were never gone.”

“Like what?”

“Does anybody want to see pictures of my new puppy?” Michael asked. “He’s just so cute. I took him to the dog park, right? And, get this, someone had brought their  _ giant  _ pet pig -”

“Blackwood.” Emma, chewing her chicken sleepily. “Why’d you even apply to the Archives? It’s not exactly a prestigious position. We’re only important if you like, know anything about the spiritual landscape of Britain.”

She was right. The Magnus Institute was a premier research institution in supernatural phenomena, but that was a bit less interesting than oncology research or space studies. It was more sociological than anything else, and that wasn’t too interesting or well funded. The Institute held a great deal of scientists, studies, and research projects, but all the Archives themselves did was collect statements and file them. It was mostly dressing for the role of Head Archivist - which  _ was  _ important, and was the second highest position in the Institute itself - but being an archival assistant, in and of itself, was unexciting when not extremely dangerous. 

On the flip side, the Eye was the most powerful Entity in the world at the moment, due to the ebb and flow of Entity power landscapes that really only Jon and others of his position had any hope of tracking. The Magnus Institute was the seat of its power.  _ Jon  _ was the heart of the Magnus Institute. This is how he afforded a three bedroom home in Notting Hill. 

All in all, it was so difficult to get a job as an archival assistant that Jon pretty much only hired by divine judgement, but once you got there everybody tended to wonder what the big deal was. Wasn’t that just the way. But in a room of supernatural studies experts, Jon was god. In that way, it was just like any other branch of academia. 

In a room of other Avatars of the Entities, half of them learned sign language so they could talk about him behind his back, to his face. He was, in their words, ‘a dweeb’, ‘nerd’, ‘power thief’, ‘Georgie needs better taste’, ‘loser’, ‘Revenge of the Nerds type glasses freak’, ‘double apocalypse traitor’, and ‘trophy husband’. Oh, and can’t forget ‘Oculus Rift’, ‘Peepshow’, and ‘the cardboard personality man’. God, they were so mean. But sometimes he suspected that they secretly liked him, like when a pub owner tried to insist that Tiresias couldn’t come inside and Jude melted his face off with the kitchen blowtorch she always kept in her pocket. It had been heartwarming. Literally. 

“I...that’s a very complicated question. I guess I’ve just never done anything else? It’s all I know how to do, really.” Martin sounded a little distressed, and almost as if he was just realizing it. “I was free. I could have done anything. But all I wanted to do or knew how to do was this.”

Long, awkward silence. “Uh,” Emma said, “okay.”

“My degree is in accounting,” Eric said helpfully.

“I was an English major,” Michael said proudly. 

“I went to Oxford,” Jon reminded everyone.

“ _ We know _ ,” everyone said simultaneously, even Martin.

Lunchtime raged on. Everybody made idle, stupid conversation. Jon laughed, and Jon felt happy, and Jon felt trapped. 

It was only when they all packed up to go, Eric taking Jon’s plate to throw away, that Jon was able to hang back in the tail end of the group to speak with Martin. Emma and Eric chatted absently about going out for drinks Friday evening, and Jon felt Martin’s fingers brush his as he pushed his chair back in. 

“Are you ever going to explain?” Jon hissed. 

“What don’t you know?” Martin asked quietly. “It’s not like I know something you don’t.”

“But you  _ do _ ,” Jon said, and maybe this was what pissed him off most of all, “you know everything and I know nothing. Tell me the truth.”

“Jon?” Michael said. “Are you ready to go back?”

Jon started, almost jumping in the air. He hadn’t known Michael was still there. His voice sounded a little concerned, and Jon cursed silently. “Go on ahead. I’ll head back with Martin.” 

“If you’re sure…”

“I can  _ handle  _ it,” Martin said stiffly. “So can Jon.”

“See you back at the Archives, then,” Michael said, and Jon listened to his footsteps walk away as he and Martin waited for him to leave. Tiresias sat on Jon’s feet, waiting for his cue to get going, but Jon found himself incapable of moving. 

“Let’s take the long way back,” Jon said. He held out his elbow. “Take my arm?”

For Jon, it was only something he’d do with a friend, but he’d done it with most of his friends. For Martin, judging by the extensive length of the pause and the way he stood so stiffly when he gently looped his arm around Jon’s, the sheer act of touching another human being was bizarre and new. 

Truth be told, it wasn’t strictly necessary. Jon knew the Institute like the back of his hand. But do not let it be said that he was not smooth. Man, would Martin fall for the ‘let me touch your face to see what you look like’ thing? He  _ totally  _ would! 

At least this way they wouldn’t bump into anyone. He let Martin set the pace, aware and slightly amused of how panicked the other man was, and they waited for the other group to pull ahead of them and until they were alone in the stretching hallways of the Magnus Institute before they dared say anything. 

“What’s back?” Jon said, breaking the silence. “That was gone before?”

Martin was silent for a long second. For the first time in a very long time, Jon desperately wanted to see his facial expression. 

“I’ve been thinking about this,” Martin said finally. “For a while. I didn’t really remember for years, I just had this...vague sense that my life was missing something. I kept on looking over my shoulder and expecting someone to be there. Everything was good in my life - everything was perfect, actually, I was finally in uni and actually getting that degree I had lied about for so long - but I was always feeling just a little out of step? I didn’t really feel like me. Truth be told, I don’t know why I applied here either. At least, I didn’t when I submitted my application. Now, it’s a little different.”

“But that’s me too,” Jon said eagerly, almost too eagerly. “I’ve always felt a little off in my life, like things weren’t right. You know why, don’t you? You have to tell me!”

Was there anybody out there who understood him? Was it Martin Blackwood, out of everyone he had ever met, who finally understood this strange discomfort that he had never quite been able to voice? 

“You aren’t trying to compulse me at all,” Martin said, as if he had just noticed. 

Jon stopped short. “Of course I’m not. You’re trying to decide if I’m ready to hear something, and if you’re ready to talk about it. Why would I force that out of you? I don’t use the compulsion if it’s not necessary. It can really hurt people, you know.”

A long silence, Jon and Martin standing alone in a hallway. Finally, Martin said, “That’s not the Jon I know. See, this is - this is what I mean. I kept almost all of the Beholding’s - download, I guess you were calling it? And you didn’t. It seems like you just got traces. Why was it different? Jon, I think - I think there’s some things that are kind of hard to know. And your previous life was one of them. And maybe knowing wouldn’t really help.”

“Help what?”

“This discontentment you’re feeling.”

But it has to, Jon thought. It has to. If knowing what he was missing didn’t make him feel better, make him feel whole, what would? 

“I’m different than I used to be,” Martin continued. “Really different, actually. And you are too. Maybe that old life wasn’t important. And - uh, I get the impression that all the Avatars remember what you’ve forgotten. All the Avatars but...you. You might want to ask yourself why that is.”

“I had a dream,” Jon said weakly. “About - you? You had walked into the room without your trousers. I saw impressions of you, but they faded away.”

They walked back to the Archives in silence, both of them deep in thought about their own problems. Which were, somehow, the same problems. 

Did Jon not remember because he had a mental block? That seemed to be what Martin was suggesting. Was it even a good idea for him to remember? That was the other thing that Martin was suggesting. That, actually, he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. That if he didn’t know, he was better off. 

But how could he be better off like this? Living in fear of something that was too scary to know? Always feeling just a little wrong, just a little out of place? There was no way that his previous life could be that bad. 

“The one thing I don’t understand,” Martin said quietly, when they finally came to the door to the Archives, “is why it was just me.”

“Just you what?”

“Tim, Sasha, Melanie, Basira, Daisy - they all stayed here, right? They quit, but they stayed? Why was I the only person who everybody forgot?” 

Jon didn’t know. “Maybe you would have ruined it.”

“But who brings you tea?” Martin asked, strangely distressed over the concept. “Who makes sure that you don’t work too late?”

“I can make my own tea,” Jon snapped, a little bit harsher than he meant to, like he always did. “I’m not an invalid.”

“That’s not what I meant -”

“If you’re avoiding telling me  _ vital information  _ about my own life to  _ protect  _ me, save it,” Jon said coldly. “I’m not a child.”

“I know that, but you’ve always been bad about taking care of yourself, and I’ve always felt as if you needed me to look after you -”

He did not put up with this from all of his friends for years, still putting up with it now, to hear it from some stranger who hadn’t even known the old Jon. What did Martin know? Whatever memories he thought he had, if he was the only keeper of them, were they even real? 

“I’ll take a pass on your pity, Blackwood,” Jon said, and opened the door to the Archives and walked inside without Martin. The effect was ruined by the several seconds it took for him to grope for the doorknob, which just made him even madder, and by the time that he stomped through the main office rooms and disappeared into his office he was fuming. 

Jon didn’t  _ need  _ anyone’s help. He could do it all by himself. He could get around his house by himself, and cook his own food, and go to work every day, and get around the Archives. He dressed himself, went to the restroom by himself, filed his own taxes and flew on airplanes by himself. He can take care of his dog and he can take care of a teenager. These were all things that he could do. 

But, as Georgie, Elias, every friend he had, his doctor, his occupational therapist, his rehab nurse, his therapist, and random strangers on the street told him, he didn’t have to. Jon didn’t have to suffer needlessly in order to prove a point to himself. The people around him were willing to help if he needed it, and they would. It was a basic societal agreement. Others helping him navigate or read out loud things for him wasn’t pity anymore than Jon holding a door open for someone in a wheelchair was pity. 

Jon, as a younger man, had always been a loner. He had always been someone who had never needed anybody, who could make it through life alone. But the events of the past three years had forced him to rely on other people just a little bit more. Open up, almost. He was honestly social now, fairly cheerful with a wide circle of friends. He had family now. That had been the hardest thing about losing his sight: not the inability to read paper books, although that had been extremely painful, and not the inability to see beautiful things. Just the fact that he had to ask others for help now, and that it wasn’t a bad thing. 

When three o' clock rolled around, and Michael entered his office with a cup of tea like he did every day, Jon glared balefully at the direction the steam was coming from on his desk. 

“Why do you bring me tea every day.”

“Because...you don’t hydrate otherwise?” Michael sounded half-amused and half-confused, which was fair. “Daisy said that you went three days without drinking water once.”

“I can make my own tea,” Jon said sullenly. 

“Sure,” Michael said easily, as if it was so obvious it wasn’t worth discussing. “But you don’t, and we’re already in the kitchen at three every day for gossip, and it feels unfair for everyone to have a tea break but you, so I just bring one back for you. If you want to make your own then you should start actually joining us in the kitchen.”

Because they were friends, basically. 

Jon should apologize to Martin. That thought, at least, was familiar. 

He got his chance when he went home for the day, coat slung over one arm, Tiresias alertly sniffing the air as he locked his office door. He walked into the main room, already wondering if it was raining outside again, and heard the faint sound of clattering at a keyboard. Normally he was the last one to leave the office every day, but maybe not anymore. Maybe Martin was used to a different kind of work culture. Or maybe it was his habit, to wait for Jon to leave, to make sure that he left at a reasonable hour. 

“Night, Blackwood,” Jon said, shrugging on his coat. “Don’t stay too late.”

“Have a good night, Jon,” Martin said politely. 

But Jon didn’t move, and Martin’s fingers of the keyboard stilled. 

This was the part Jon was shittiest at. He sighed. “I’m sorry for snapping at you. You didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Martin said, surprisingly vehemently. “I keep on trying to treat you like my Jon, when you aren’t. You’re a completely different person, with a different life, and I have to respect that. I’ll get used to the - changes.”

“What about me is different?” Jon - teased? Teased? Jon didn’t tease. 

“You’re a lot nicer, for one,” Martin said, and Jon could hear a smile in his voice. 

“Is that all?”

“You actually look like you get enough sleep,” Martin said, and that was definitely a smile. “And your filing system is much better.”

“Any  _ visual  _ differences?”

“I miss the worm scars,” Martin said, “since they were a little dashing, but not that ugly tattoo.”

“Tattoo?” Jon yelped, ignoring the part where Martin called him dashing. “I got a tattoo? Where?”

“Nope, not telling you. Don’t want to give you any ideas.” Martin hesitated a second. “So, you still want to do dinner? I’d like to see how Georgie’s doing. We only met a few times, but she always seemed nice. And, uh, really scary.”

“That’s Georgie,” Jon said easily. “And yeah, dinner sounds good. Next Friday, at eight?”

“Sounds good,” Martin said, and Jon was so caught up in the concept of Martin meeting his family that he completely forgot why he had the niggling sense that Friday was occupied. 

Oh, well. If it was important he would remember. Jon wasn’t a very forgetful person. 

Present circumstances excluded. 

  
  
  
  
  


The next day, Jon was late for work due to his opthamologist appointment (still blind with NLP, still cautious over eyes getting an infection and rotting out of his head). He was even more late for work because he got coffee with Daisy, who was the  _ other  _ scariest woman he knew and thus his  _ other  _ best friend. Actually, Georgie was more of a platonic life partner, while Daisy was more like someone who you sipped virgin margaritas with and talked shit about people. Jon unironically adored her and Daisy tolerated him, which was impressive when you knew that she tolerated two people.

They sat at their coffee shop down the street from the Institute, both sitting outside and enjoying the breeze on their faces. Tiresias lapped water from a collapsible bowl, panting softly under Jon’s chair as Daisy tapped her fingers on the metal table. The coffee shop was very used to Jon, and they had no issue with his dog or with Daisy’s…Daisyness. 

Jon finished telling her about the weird Martin drama, sighing at the end of it. “I just don’t know what to do. On one hand, I want to respect his privacy and not get weird about secrets and other people’s trauma again. On the other hand, it’s murdering me knowing that I had this whole other life that I just forgot about.” 

Daisy sipped noisily on her black coffee. Basira had mentioned, a long time ago, that Daisy talked to him more than she talked to anybody else because she couldn’t rely on significant glances or placid expressions. Still, she found her ways. 

Finally, she said as Jon took a sip of his own Earl Grey, “You know I’m an Avatar.”

Jon choked on his tea, which of course was why she waited. “You’re  _ what _ ?”

“I dunno. Like, kinda. I was a bit. I’m not right now. I think, if things had gotten any worse, then I would have been. But it...stopped. And receded. I’m just me, right now. I think.” A long pause, as Daisy sipped her drink again. “What I’m saying is, I know. There was another world. Now we’re in this one. I don’t really remember anything more than that.”

“Wait, wait, wait. A  _ world _ ?” Jon had thought that this had just been exceptionally complex amnesia. Now they were talking about parallel dimensions? “What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve killed people,” Daisy said, her voice reading very clearly ‘you idiot’. “A lot of people.”

“But...that’s illegal?”

“The law doesn’t matter if nobody enforces it. Anyway, I woke up one day. Went to work. Went to the retirement party of an old colleague with Basira. But one of the guys there I had killed. Years ago. Corrupt dickhead. He had deserved it. But he was there at the party, happy as anything. Basira thought I was nutters.” Daisy sipped her drink again. “Woke up the next morning to a text from Georgie saying that you had been in an accident. I knew I wasn’t crazy, but after that we had bigger problems. So I just...didn’t worry about it.”

Jon opened his mouth, then closed it. Finally, he said. “That’s not a coincidence.”

“It kept on happening,” Daisy said quietly. “I can’t remember it fully, not like an actual Avatar. But I keep on seeing people and thinking that they can’t possibly be alive, because I killed them. I just thought my violent fantasies were getting out of hand, convincing me that I was dreaming about murder so much I was getting fantasy and reality confused. Guess they weren’t.” She paused, almost uncertainly, if Daisy could be called uncertain. “I have dreams. Not every night, but a lot of nights. That I’m lying in a coffin. I can move a little, I can breathe, but I’m trapped. I beat on the roof of the coffin, but nobody can hear me. I can’t escape. When I scream, nobody can hear me. Nobody is coming. And I know, in those dreams, that my life is just a good dream that saves me from remembering that I’m trapped in that coffin, forever. But I’ll always have to wake up, whenever I go to sleep, and remember that I’m still in that coffin.”

Jon deadass didn’t know what to say to that. 

Finally, all he could think to say was, “Did you...murder the people again?”

The idea of Daisy, one of his best friends, calm and sure,  _ killing  _ people was crazy. Jon didn’t know murderers! Who weren’t Jude Perry! Death just wasn’t something Jon frequently ran up against in his life. The idea that there were living people out there, people who were as kind and nice as Daisy, just ending other lives...it made Jon shiver. 

“I think if I do,” Daisy said quietly, “then I’ll wake up in the coffin. And then I really won’t be able to escape. So no. Kinda want to. But a bigger part of me kinda doesn’t.”

“That’s...good.”

“Yep.” Daisy’s chair skidded against the brick. “Let’s go back to the Institute. I want to have a chat with this Martin Blackwood, I think.”

“Uh.” Jon abruptly began sweating. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Good for you.” 

“I, uh - if you insist.”

They always must have made a funny figure walking down the street - Jon with black glasses, dog, and cane, and Daisy in her five foot blonde glory. In their slightly younger days, when Jon was a lot angrier and Daisy was perhaps recovering from almost being an agent of the Hunt - how had he known that? - they used to pull a scam where they walked down the street in a bad part of London and then Daisy would beat up anybody who tried to hassle them. Great bonding experience for the two of them. 

Georgie liked to joke that the only thing that could part the crowds in a London street was a white cane. She also fastidiously avoided mentioning how many people unabashedly stared at him, but Jon knew. It didn’t take a genius. 

When they stepped into the Archives together, Jon felt the room freeze. He definitely heard Martin gasp. He wondered if Martin and Daisy knew each other - it felt as if they did, right? Hadn’t Martin mentioned something like that? He definitely had a fuzzy memory of all of them standing in Elias’ office, as Elias did some evil monologue or another. 

Oh, yeah: Michael, Emma, and Eric  _ worshipped  _ Daisy. She had worked there for two weeks to help them get accustomed to the work before peacing out, and although Jon had been an outpatient during that time apparently she had left quite an impression. 

“Daisy!” Emma squealed -  _ squealed _ . “You’re back! How are you?”

“Let me get you some tea,” Michael said quickly. “Or whiskey. Do you want some whiskey?”

“I’ve been filing just like you taught me,” Eric said anxiously. 

“Whatever,” Daisy said, oblivious or uncaring to her fan club. “Martin, outside.”

Jon imagined every head in the room swivelling to look at Martin, but he had the sense that he wasn’t just imagining it. 

“B - Blackwood?” Eric said. “What do you want him for?”

“Now.”

“Nice to see you again,” Martin said, sounding exhausted. His chair scraped against the hardwood. “Be right back.”

The door closed behind them, and everybody stood in terrified silence. 

“Oh my god,” Emma whispered. “Blackwood’s an ex-KGB agent and Daisy’s blackmailing him.”

“Blackwood’s an escaped criminal and Daisy’s been chasing him for weeks,” Michael whispered, way too excited about it.

“You’re all such drama queens,” Eric said, exasperated. “I bet  _ all  _ that’s going on is that Daisy knows that Martin is a plant by the Dark to infiltrate our agency and she’s threatening him at knifepoint to get out of our office.”

“Don’t you all have work to do?” Jon asked loudly. “Things a wee bit more important than speculating on the personal life of your coworker?”

“But he’s just so creepy, Boss!” Michael burst out. “He’s such a weird dude!”

“Mike’s right,” Emma said flatly. “He has squirrely eyes. Dude’s hiding something.”

“ _ Don’t  _ call me Mike -”

“Shut it, prissy.”

“Maybe it’s because he used to work for the Lonely,” Eric said thoughtfully. “Lonely cultists are always such weird people. Like they’re living somewhere else, even when they’re right in front of you, you know?”

“Eric’s the expert on weird people,” Michael whispered loudly. “Marrying -”

“Shut  _ up  _ about my ex-wife -”

“But it’s so funny that you married that,” Emma said. “I can’t believe it.”

“We all make mistakes,” Eric said flatly. “Even you, when you bought that eyeshadow.”

“Burn,” Michael whispered. 

It was at that point Jon began developing a stress headache, so he promptly tuned out of their conversation in favor of massaging his temples. He folded up his cane, silently regretting his life up to that point, and didn’t pay any more attention until the door opened again and somebody walked back in. 

“See you later, Jon,” Daisy said. “Basira said she’s bringing Om Ali for the dinner party.”

“Bye, Daisy!” Jon said cheerfully. “Thanks for getting coffee with me.”

“Always have a second for my friends,” Daisy said, which was the nicest thing she’d said to him in half a year, and thus was a pointed barb at Martin. The door shut, and Jon was left in what was suddenly a very awkward atmosphere. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Blackwood,” Emma said, undoubtedly for Jon’s benefit. “What did Daisy say that got you so spooked?”

“I have to go file...everything. Bye,” Martin said, before fleeing quickly into the library and locking the door behind him.

“I told you,” Emma said triumphantly, the minute he was out of earshot. “Mafia.”

“That’s not what you said at all,” Michael said accusingly. 

“But it’s so  _ obviously  _ Mafia, probably one of the Slaughter aligned ones -”

“What about Blackwood makes you think he’s aligned with the Slaughter!”

“There’s nothing behind his eyes,” Emma whispered spookily. 

“I have actual work to do,” Jon said loudly, walking towards his office. “As do all of you, so stop gossiping and go back to work!”

But Jon couldn’t focus on the piles of work he really had to get done, obsessing again. 

Was there something he was missing? He thought of Martin and felt...soft, squishy, kind and good. Kind of overbearing, rather annoying, definitely incompetent, but there was nothing about Martin that could possibly be suspicious. But everyone seemed convinced, absolutely sure that there was something just a little wrong about him. Something in the eyes, they said, something in the way he isolated himself. Always saying the wrong things, from a sketchy background. He  _ deeply  _ hoped that his assistants weren’t suddenly and very randomly racist, but as he’d heard that Emma was Indian he doubted it. Still, not impossible. 

And Daisy - what had she said to him, that she didn’t want Jon to hear? What secret did she share with him? Did they swap memories of the world he didn’t know, laughing at how little Jon understood? They wouldn’t - Daisy didn’t laugh, for one, and it was rare to hear Blackwood laugh either - oh, now he was calling him Blackwood too! Jon scowled, making up his mind. If they didn’t want him eavesdropping, then they shouldn’t be talking about him behind his back. 

Jon stood up from his desk, opening one of his drawers and picking up his blindfold from where he had carefully packed it. Slowly, ritualistically, he took off his black glasses and tied it around his eyes. He walked to a corner of his office, sinking down to his knees and quieting his breath. Focus. It was difficult to do so with events in the past, even more difficult with events in the future, but if he just _concentrated_ and _asked_ then he could open his mind. 

Deep breath, in one, out two. It was like prayer. Jon asked the Beholding, politely, for knowledge. He stretched his mind out, widening it to accommodate the expanse of knowledge. 

It hit him like a truck. 

It didn’t send him images. It never did. But it sent him descriptions, like a book, that Jon could build a narrative of. He received a vivid mental description, building it into his own imagined image. Daisy, standing against the wall outside the Archives, frowning with her arms crossed over her chest. She was as tall as Martin, blonde hair tied back in a long braid slung across her shoulder. Martin was overwhelmed seeing her again, for the first time, silently so awed at how different she looked from the way he remembered. She looked happier, Martin thought, calmer and at peace. She had looked like a violent animal at the end, eyes only lighting up at the prospect of violence and destruction, but now - it was just Daisy, or maybe who Daisy should have been. 

“Jon has been through enough,” Daisy said. “Leave him alone.”

“I - wha - you can’t - that’s not fair!”

Typical Martin response, both Martin and Daisy thought, both of them surprised at the thought. 

“It took years to get him back to some semblance of functional,” Daisy said. “You don’t know how much of a mess that man is. He doesn’t need you to stir up old obsessions.”

“I  _ know _ ,” Martin said, oddly furious. “I know better than anybody. But he deserves to know the truth about his life. About what happened to him!”

“And what will that solve, Martin Blackwood?” Daisy asked. “Congrats. Jonathan Sims remembers every shitty second of his shitty past life. He knows every detail of the deal he made. You have what you want, a Jon who loves you again. But at the cost of his happy life. Is that what you want?”

“It’s not that selfish!”

“Isn’t it? I don’t know as much as you do. But I know what even being half of an Avatar did to me. What do you think it’ll do to Jon?”

A memory: Jon - Jon - Jon, himself, couldn’t see it. But it scared Martin. 

“You might know the old Jon better than anybody,” Daisy said. “But you don’t know the Jon now. I’m not saying that you can’t talk, or hang out, or whatever. But let sleeping dogs lie, Blackwood. They bite, if you wake them up.”

“Happy to have your permission,” Martin said dryly. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

“Take it under more than advisement.” Daisy stepped closer, almost pushing him against the wall, and there was something as cold and demented in her eyes as there was in Martin’s, as there may have been in Jon’s, once upon a time. “Because I remember one thing about my past life. How very,  _ very  _ good I was at murder. And I’m not afraid to learn again.”

Martin gulped, eyes wide and terrified. Another memory, but it wasn’t Martin’s it was Jon’s - Daisy, with a knife at his throat, saying that the world was better off minus one monster -

And Jon knew, because the Beholding told him, that this was what Daisy was afraid of Jon remembering. She meant everything she said, of course. Daisy never lied. But some part of her, some part that still felt fear, was afraid that Jon would see the kind of monster Daisy used to be and reject her. So she threatened Martin. Wasn’t that just her, all the way. 

Suddenly he felt the ground under his knees again. He felt the blindfold over his eyes. The memory, the knowledge, faded. Jon woke up, sitting in the corner of his office, Tiresias softly whuffing next to him. 

“Oh, shit, he’s communing with god - we’ll come back, Jon!”

“No need,” Jon groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He stood up slowly, disoriented and a little confused, and swiped his hand against the wall. It collided with a bookshelf. Desk was back that way, then. He knew his own damn office, but he was just so confused. If he had his vision, it would be swimming. The world felt all topsy turvy. “Paracetamol, please.”

Someone stepped forward, and judging from the weight of the hand on his back it was Michael, and guided Jon to the seat whose location he knew perfectly, but he was so disoriented he couldn’t complain. He collapsed in the chair as someone else pressed pills into his hand, and he quickly swigged it. He was going to work up a tolerance at this rate. 

“We just wanted to tell you that Gertrude says she wants to see you,” Eric said, a little worried in comparison to Michael’s Very Worried. “So, whenever you’re ready -”

“Tell her if she has anything to say she can email me it,” Jon groaned. “I’m taking a nap. Goodnight.”

“At your desk? At least use the depression cot in the storage room.”

“Do we have to tell Miss Gertrude no?” Michael asked fretfully. “I really don’t like telling her that we won’t do things. I’m so scared of her.”

“We can make Blackwood say it,” Eric muttered. 

“Oh, good idea.”

“Cot sounds good,” Jon said fuzzily, taking a deep breath and standing up from his chair. “Cot right now.”

Man, he had really overdone it. Normally he asked for tidbits, impressions, not outright scenes. What had made him think that his connection with the Beholding was that strong? 

It used to be that strong. In that other life. Jon knew this, somehow. There was a time when he had known  _ everything _ . Seen everything. But he had given it up - why? Had the power been so evil that he had cut off the part of himself that felt it? 

Daisy had made the deal Jon made sound obvious. She, at least, seemed sure. The resurrection of her victims, the way Martin seemed convinced that the dead walked now - happening the day Jon lost his eyesight. It couldn’t be coincidence. But her memories were half-formed and incomplete, and Martin was not trustworthy, no matter how much Jon wanted him to be. Surely there had to be more to it. 

Come on - the loss of Jon’s sight in exchange for who knows how many lives? That’s not even a contest. The Eye would never take a deal that much in Jon’s favor. No, a piece was missing. He could ask Martin, but there was no guarantee that Martin would tell him the complete truth. Not if there was a chance that it would hurt him. 

“Do you want our help -”

“No,” Jon said, a little too harshly, and forced his voice to soften. He got up from the chair and forced himself to orient towards the door. “I can walk across two rooms by myself.”

Then he tripped over Tiresias, because he was walking in the opposite direction of the door. Eric narrowly caught him before he landed flat on his face. Jon hated everything. 

Excruciatingly slowly, they coached him out of his office and into the main office space. Unfortunately, Martin was working at his desk, and Jon heard his audible squeak of panic at seeing Jon practically toppling over. 

“Jon! Are you alright? Let me -”

“We got it,” Eric said cooly. “You should get back to work. Jon, come on, head up.”

A swirl of movement. A cot. Jon slowly found it, Tiresias nudging him slightly, and let himself lie down on it. They all called it the depression cot - why? When had that started? He felt like Melanie had called it that first, and that it had just stuck. Or maybe Sasha. 

Payment. Everything was payment. Jon asked the Beholding for a little too much knowledge, and for a little bit it takes away his ability to orient himself. What a dick.

Jon snorted to himself, head still throbbing. What would he have to give, to get those memories back? Was having them punishment enough? 

He fell asleep easily, like unknowingly striding off a cliff. 

  
  
  


He dreamed - or remembered, because these were equivalent things - a conversation with Mike Crew. 

He had met Mike Crew a few times. He was an occasional boyfriend of Michael, and a frequent attendee of Avatar social events. He worked with Simon, always very polite, nice enough guy. Of course, no Avatars were  _ nice _ , but he was pleasant enough conversation at a conference or social event. Jon was really only personally friends with the other female avatars, because Georgie was friends with them, but Mike Crew was never - 

Sitting in a hard chair, the sunlight baking on his face. Polite words, and the  _ crushing  _ sense of vertigo. Jon fell, and fell, and fell - a Statement, somewhere in there, but Jon couldn’t listen, now when he was falling while sitting still -

Then Daisy, monstrous and murderous. She killed him. She killed him, as if he was a thing, and not a person with hopes and dreams. She beat up Jon - no, Daisy would never do that, she was kind. But she did. She pointed a gun at him. 

But something about the memory seemed to twist, grow confused. She was pointing a gun at him but Jon couldn’t tell. He kept on talking to her, like she was his friend, and she was saying ‘hands up, hands up’, but Jon couldn’t see that he was in danger. So she shot him, because he wasn’t respecting her gun, and it wasn’t until Jon bled out on the ground and his glasses shattered on the floor that she realized that he couldn’t obey what he couldn’t see. 

And somewhere, some other Daisy in some other life, choked in dirt. 

  
  
  


When Jon woke up, just an hour later, he went to speak to Gertrude. 

First, however, he called Mike Crew. He picked up on the second ring, always polite. 

“Hullo, Archivist. What’s wrong?”

“Just wanted to make sure you were alive,” Jon said, exhausted. “I had a - bad dream.”

Tellingly, Mike Crew was silent. Finally, he carefully said, “Alive and kicking. Any other assurances I can give?”

That, somehow, confirmed it for Jon. Every Avatar knew. And they were all keeping it from him. It couldn’t be to protect him - they barely liked him. Hell, most of them  _ didn’t  _ like him. Elias was his ex-boss, and if there was anything he could tell Jon to damage him psychologically he would. So why hadn’t he told Jon about his memories, if they would hurt him as badly as Daisy was convinced they would?

It was like some sort of stupid conspiracy. Jon hated conspiracies. He had believed in half of them when he was fifteen before he realized that they were all racist or anti-semetic. Either that or they were just the world of the Infernal Entities That Controlled Our World, which was always such a boring and scientific explanation. There was no mystery to any of it. Bigfoot wasn’t fun once you knew that he was just a man driven mad and hairy by the Lonely. 

Still. If his dream was correct, then Mike Crew’s death was Jon’s fault. Well, Daisy had done it, but it was still in a roundabout way his fault. “No, thank you. And - and I’m sorry. For everything. Thanks. Bye.”

“Giving people vertigo wasn’t  _ that  _ fun,” Mike said, after a second of confused silence. “But apology accepted. See you at the next get-together, Archivist.”

“See you then,” Jon said, tiredly, and Mike Crew hung up on him. 

It was a small community, Britain’s spiritual authorities. In quantity, not in range - Julia and Trevor were still in America, he thought, which was a pity. He liked Julia, although Gerry always seemed scared of her for some reason. Maybe he had a crush. They all knew something he didn’t. And Jon had the feeling that they had decided as one not to tell him. 

But there was one authority who hated every other one, who refused to attend any get-togethers or any social events. She sent Jon by himself to every conference, and didn’t even speak to Elias any more than she strictly had to. If there was anybody who didn’t give a shit about Jon’s feelings or the consensus of everybody else, it was her. She was his best bet. Maybe his only bet. 

Jon touched his watch, and listened to it tell him that it was three. She wouldn’t be in a meeting - not that she ever voluntarily attended any. He grabbed Tiresias’ harness and escaped the Archives, waving away everyone’s concern as they huddled in the small kitchen, and took the elevator up three flights to Gertrude’s office. 

Rosie greeted him when he walked up, and Jon waved absently in her direction. He had never quite understood Rosie, who treated Elias and Gertrude with the same calm patience that you needed bucket loads of to deal with either of them. Superhuman. Made great lemon squares.  _ Very  _ active in the church. 

Jon knocked on her door, then let himself in without waiting for her to tell him to come in. He walked inside, Tiresias stopping at the familiar chair in front of her desk, and he dropped into it. 

“You wanted to see me?” Jon asked cheerfully. 

“Yes. Three hours ago.” Gertrude’s voice was cold and sharp, impatient and unplaceable. He never told her, but he liked it a lot. He remembered what she looked like, of course - he had been an archival assistant for quite a while before he was promoted, although less time than was common - but somehow it was difficult to remember. Her close cropped white hair, her stiff dresses. It didn’t feel very important. “I hope what you were busy with was worth it.”

“What do you know about Martin Blackwood?” Jon asked, completely uncaring of what she had wanted to see him about. Some boring thing, probably. 

Gertrude sighed, very loudly. Understanding Gertrude was a study in micro-facial expressions, rather than what she said: in her eye twitches, in the tightening of her lips, in her stern looks of disapproval. Unfortunately, when talking to Jon she, like everybody else, was forced to use their words, so she had adapted by sighing very loudly. 

“I am not interested in your obsessions, Jon.”

“Obsessions?” Jon asked sharply. “What have I been obsessed with?”

“Mythical countries. For two months. It was all you talked about.” Oh, yeah. He had been reading a book on them. “I will not indulge you on this. If you’re going to play Sherlock Holmes again, do it outside of work hours.”

“Big talk from the woman always playing Batman,” Jon muttered. “We could have helped you stop all those rituals, you know.”

Gertrude was silent. Jon had the strange feeling he had touched on a delicate emotional topic, except that would have required her to have emotions. 

Unless she knew something he didn’t. 

“In some things, one must be solitary,” Gertrude said finally, but she sounded a bit - rattled? Gertrude, rattled? “If you’re ready to talk about work now -”

To hell with it. Jon leaned forward in his seat, fists clenching on his lap. “Admit that you’re keeping secret the fact that we’re all living in a different universe.”

“I’m hardly keeping it a secret,” Gertrude said dryly. “You never asked.”

It was like she had punched him. Jon exhaled softly. So it was true. Well, he had known it was true, but it had never felt - real. But if Gertrude said it, it was true. They were all transplants from a different world. 

“Why don’t I remember?” Jon asked urgently. “Why does every Avatar remember but me?”

“Goodness, Jon, how should I know?” Gertrude said. As if the question of if  _ Jon’s entire life was a lie  _ was  _ annoying _ . “I was hardly there.”

“You - you weren’t there?” Jon blinked hard. “Why wouldn’t you be there? You’ve been working for the Institute since before I was born, you had to have been there.”

“I believe I was a little occupied being dead at the time.” Gertrude’s voice was wry, almost filled with humor. “I don’t have the answers you’re seeking.”

Jon sat back in his chair, dimly aware his jaw was dropped. 

Dead? Gertrude, dead? Dead Gertrude? That’s impossible. She was immortal, like Elias. Or at least he had always assumed. Woman could literally do a backflip, he had seen it. She could blow up a building with C4. Gertrude Robinson didn’t just  _ die _ . It was wrong. It was against the natural order of humanity. It was like Queen Elizabeth II dying. Just didn’t happen. Nothing in life was inevitable, save for death, taxes, and Gertrude Robinson. 

“How?” Jon found himself asking. It was the only question he could possibly think of. 

“Hm. I’m not sure.” Papers rustled on Gertrude’s desk. “Elias came into my office with a gun, we had an emotional conversation, and - that’s all I remember. I suppose a genius such as yourself can put together the pieces from there.”

“Holy shit.”

“Quite. Is that all, or are you ready to talk about managerial evaluations?”

“No, go back. Elias murdered you? Did - did he go to prison? Please tell me Elias went to prison. You still  _ talk  _ to him.” Not, like, civilly, but still. 

“You’ll find, Jon, when you’ve lived as long as Elias and I have, that when something didn’t happen, you accept that it didn’t happen. I’m alive. Elias didn’t kill me. What’s there to hold a grudge about?” The rustle of papers stopped, for just a second. “When someone is alive now, and they weren’t before...best to count that a blessing, I think. And not to worry about what we may have done, in another world or another situation.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“How is Gerard?” Gertrude asked suddenly. Jon was caught by the topic change. She always seemed interested in how he was doing, asking Eric or Jon on updates when normally she didn’t give a single shit about their personal lives. “Is he well?”

“He’s getting detentions and trying to convince me they’re field trips,” Jon said, thrown. “So, pretty well. I’m sorry, can we go back to  _ your death _ ? Is that what happened, I sacrificed my eyesight to bring people back to life?”

“You read your employee handbook, didn’t you?” Gertrude asked rhetorically. “Upon what conditions does the Eye take your eyes?”

“When you haven’t done your due service to it,” Jon said automatically. No, not quite - Jon’s first thought was  _ when you try to quit _ , but that wasn’t right. “When you commit a betrayal. You could bargain them away, I suppose, but eyes for lives isn’t quite a fair bargain.”

“Then that must be what happened. You betrayed it, and you paid the price. But it kept you on, because unfortunately you are actually a good Archivist, and now I have to deal with these asinine questions. Are you quite satisfied, Jon?”

“No! Not at fucking all!” Jon leaned forward again, desperate, almost pleading. “What kind of person was I, in this other world? Martin liked me, but people liked Martin there and nobody seems to like him here. Was I a bad person, or just someone who was so fucked up I acted bad?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gertrude said sharply, with almost more emotion than he had ever heard from her. “Whatever we may have done in that other world, it doesn’t matter! It’s gone, now! It’s reversed! I stopped every ritual for fifty years, and in your second year of being Archivist you fucked it up. Congratulations. Now none of it mattered. Now nothing bad ever happens. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“But something bad did happen,” Jon said numbly. “Something bad happened to me.”

“I cannot begin to thank you for what you’ve done for me, Jon,” Gertrude said, almost softly. “More...more than I will ever tell you. More than saving my life. But you made your decision with a sound mind and a clear heart. Trust in the Jon who made that decision. Trust that he wanted to do it, and that he knew it was the right thing to do. You’ve been feeling sorry for yourself for three years. Get the fuck over it. Get out of my office.”

“Gertrude -”

“Out!”

He got out. 

But that sentence rang through his mind. It didn’t stop. It rang through his mind as he struggled through work, as he walked to the Underground station, as he rode the train in silence. As he stepped through the door of his house, as he fell limply on his couch. His butt-imprint, his Jeopardy, his normal and ordinary day to day that was so perfect it wasn’t enough for him. 

Had he been feeling sorry for himself? He hadn’t thought so. He had thought that he was okay with everything. Things were fine, weren’t they? His life was better than it ever was. He had good friends, a loving partner, a great kid, an expensive house, an overpaid and fulfilling job. Jon wasn’t unhappy. He wasn’t moping. He was living his life to the fullest, each and every day. It had been three years since the wreck, and his life was back on track. 

In another room, he heard the familiar sounds of Tiresias barking at The Admiral and making him hiss. Gerry was blasting his terrible music again, but through headphones. Working on homework, or browsing those weird forums, or reading his thick books. Why was Gertrude so interested in him? She never asked deep questions, just vague inquiries into if he was well, if he was doing alright. Like she cared, but like she didn’t have the right to know too deeply. A careful distance. Like Gerry kept from Eric, how he treated him like a stranger. 

The first month had been bad. Jon never liked hospitals, and losing his sight scared him. His therapist said that becoming disabled usually involves a grieving process, because you were mourning the life that you had thought you would live. Most of the difficulty when being disabled was because of society refusing to accommodate for you - your job firing you, your friends and family treating you differently, difficulties in mobility or finances or healthcare. Jon didn’t have any of that. Everybody had been perfectly supportive, his job had kept him, and his finances were great. He hadn’t even driven  _ before  _ the wreck. He didn’t even remember why he was in a car at all, actually. But that was the head trauma. He didn’t remember a whole week before the wreck, but that was normal. 

Less normal was not remembering a life. What about Jon was so unique, that he was the sole Avatar who didn’t remember? Was it a part of the cost, the same cost that took his eyes? Or was it a benefit? 

Martin and Daisy seemed to view it as a benefit. A better thing, a blessing, for him not to know. A part of the happiness that they all shared. A gift, from the Eye to Jon. 

The other world definitely didn’t seem great. Daisy was evil. He got the impression that Gertrude had done quite a bit she wasn’t proud of. The only person who wanted him to remember was Martin, and even he seemed uncertain. Jon had the feeling that Martin just wanted their friendship back. He could hardly blame him. 

Somehow, what hurt most was knowing that he had betrayed the Eye. He would never do that. He was a loyal servant, and he always had been. He wouldn’t have been promoted to Head Archivist, a position even closer to the Eye than the Head of the Institute, if he wasn’t. 

His therapist had said that it was common to blame yourself. But it was Jon’s fault. He had done this to himself. Somehow, that was the worst part. He was always self-destructing. This time, he had just done it in a way that was a little more permanent. 

“Good evening, family. And  _ hello,  _ Terry! Who’s a good boy!”

Jon didn’t move, even when Georgie walked across the living room to stand in front of him. His eyes were closed, his hands crossed over his chest, and Jeopardy was off. For all appearances, so much as they were worth anything, he was asleep. 

“Why are you sulking on the couch?”

Jon scowled. He hated how deeply Georgie knew him. “I’m not sulking.”

“Yes you are. Rough day at work?”

“It was...exhausting, yes.” Jon sighed, and wriggled to the far end of the couch in silent invitation. Georgie took it, lying down next to him, and let him press against her chest. He slung an arm around her shoulder, fitting her under him, and breathed her scent in deeply. “Thanks.”

“Aw, we’re cuddling? I guess you weren’t kidding about your day.” She scratched his scalp lightly, the way he liked. “You’re like a big spider-monkey.”

“Do I mope?” Jon said into her shoulder. 

“Yeah? So do I. What about it?”

“Gertrude said that I’m still moping over the accident.”

“Jeez, that woman.” Georgie sighed, and Jon remembered that she didn’t really like Gertrude. Apparently she was scary, which was impressive - normally when Georgie found a woman terrifying, they fucked in the next week (Georgie’s taste in men was, in a word, ‘nonthreatening’). So far as she could tell, Georgie had never so much as hit on Gertrude. He didn’t know if that said more about Georgie or Gertrude. “She doesn’t know you, dude. It doesn’t matter that you feel sad about it. That’s normal and healthy. What matters is that you’re positive about it. You’re, like, optimistic. That’s the important thing. You’re the kind of person to always think of the bad side first, but so long as you keep trying to think of the good side too, you’ll be okay.”

“I’m just used to being able to do everything on my own,” Jon said faintly. “I feel like everyone sees me as weak now. Either that or inspirational, which is a thousand times worse.”

“Ugh, remember that old lady who told me I was so  _ brave  _ for marrying you?”

Jon groaned. “Don’t remind me. Melanie was  _ right there _ .”

“She thought it was funny.”

“People look at me and think that I’m someone who needs help,” Jon said. “I’ll never be - I’ll never be someone who has it all together. Like you, or Gertrude, or even Gerry. I’m always pathetic, someone to be taken care of or who can’t manage their own life.”

“I think the good thing that came out of this,” Georgie said. “Is that you don’t have to care about appearances very much anymore. You’re allowed to just be you, Jon. Your friends only see you as you. Annoying, uppity, fake accent and all. If strangers and randos on the street don’t see how much of a pretentious jerk you are, that’s their fault. It’s not on you.”

“Thanks for the confidence booster,” Jon said dryly. 

“What’s bringing all of this up? You haven’t been this publically emo over your Daredevil impression for like, years.”

“Just - just been thinking about what might have been, recently.” Jon swallowed. “Did you know that we’re all from an alternate universe where Daisy murders people?”

“Wait. Back up?”

Jon did, and explained. By the time he was finished they had already finished migrating to the kitchen, where Georgie cooked a mushroom risotto, and Jon set the table with exacting slowness. Georgie was silent throughout most of the story, humming or making small noises to let him know she was still listening. 

At the end of it, she said finally, “Yeah, I believe it.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Daisy’s always been weird. Didn’t know she was like, murder weird, but I’m used to that.” She paused a second. “Hey, think Basira would -”

“I am  _ confident  _ Basira and Daisy are monogamous, please change the subject,” Jon said desperately. “I know she only threatened Martin because she doesn’t like seeing me upset, but I don’t need her to protect me.”

“It’s Daisy, dude. She adores you. She literally growls at people who stare at you in the street, it’s so funny.”

“Is  _ that  _ why she does that?”

“It’s cute. Are you sure that -”

“ _ Yes _ .”

“Have you asked -”

“ _ I’m not asking it that _ .”

“Okay, okay! Look, I’m just saying she’s overprotective with everyone she cares about.”

“So, me and Basira,” Jon said, depressed. 

“I think she became a cop so she could protect people,” Georgie said frankly, setting a dish down on the table. “Daisy’s dedicated to keeping people safe. It sounds like in the other universe, she was just...maybe overly dedicated to that.”

“I didn’t even know people who weren’t Oliver could be resurrected,” Jon said, sitting down in his usual chair and resting his chin on his hand. “It seems so...fantastical. Unnatural. It makes me wonder who else in my life was dead in the other timeline. Martin insinuated that -”

He was interrupted by the very familiar sound of Gerry falling down the stairs. 

“Honey!” Georgie exclaimed. “If you get any more bruises, they’re going to put you with another foster parent!”

“I’m fine!” Gerry said quickly, scrambling upright. Tiresias barked, clearly very guilty over not having prevented this turn of events. “Just fine! Not dead or anything! Alive! Kinda achey!”

Jon and, he imagined, Georgie, stared in Gerry’s direction. 

A chair scraped, and Gerry threw himself into his usual seat on Jon’s left. Silverware scraped against porcelain as he filled Jon’s plate first, carefully piling it on, before filling his own. Gerry was like that, a conscientious boy. 

“Gerry,” Georgie said slowly, sitting down herself, “is there anything you want to tell us?”

“Nope!”

“Hm. Not sure if I believe you, buddy.”

Gerry desperately slurped his food. 

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop on people’s conversations,” Jon said disapprovingly and hypocritically. “You might hear something you regret.”

“You’re both good parents,” Gerry said suddenly. “You know that, right?”

Jon turned his head to Georgie, shooting her an approximation of a confused look. He knew, out of long experience with her, that she was doing the right thing. 

“Thanks, honey,” Georgie said slowly. “You’re a good kid.”

“I’m not legally your foster parent,” Jon reminded him. “I just live here.”

“I mean it,” Gerry insisted. “You’ve both been great. About everything. Most people wouldn’t get that I feel weird about hanging out with Eric, or give me space or understand the weird way I grew up. But you do. So thanks, because you’re perfect, and you always have been.”

“Is anything wrong, Gerry?” Georgie asked, now actually concerned. “Are you in some kind of trouble? What’s bringing this on?”

“I’m just worried I don’t say it enough,” Gerry said, and Jon detected a real note of fear in his voice. “I know my situation is weird. What with me being raised a supernatural hunter and being kidnapped by Mom and meeting my dad for the first time like a year ago - yeah, everything. But you’re both really cool. And you watch Star Trek with me. Thank you. Uh, I’m not super hungry, I’m gonna take a walk. I’ll be back soon.”

Then, with his food almost untouched, Gerry pushed away from the table and ran quickly out the door. Georgie watched him go as Jon slowly ate his own food, thinking very hard.

“He knows something,” he said finally. 

“Yep.” Georgie’s sweet voice was creased in concern. “But he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“So I won’t ask.” Jon shrugged. “It’s none of our business.”

“What if it’s the answer you’ve been looking for?” Georgie asked. “If Gerry knows the secret to everything that’s been happening to you, and he just doesn’t feel like talking about it, is that okay?”

“Yes,” Jon said, with a firmness that surprised himself. “It’s not his job to ease my neuroses. My problems aren’t his. Whatever makes him happy and healthy is what we’ll do.”

“You know,” Georgie said thoughtfully. “I think you’d make a pretty good dad.”

“If you and Melanie make that decision, I’ll donate whatever you want,” Jon said flatly, going back to his food. “Otherwise, no.”

“Oh, motherhood is definitely on the list for me,” Georgie said cheerfully. Jon was well aware - their conversation about her being a foster mom had been lengthy. “But when there’s so many kids out there who need homes, isn’t that more important than putting my own genetics in it? I just want to give some kid out there who was in our situation a better life, you know? Our home is already blind motherfucker proof, we should shoot for a kid with special needs next.”

“We?”

“Unless you’re planning on moving out,” Georgie teased. 

“I’m capable!”

“I know,” Georgie said. “But your name is on the lease, we’d both have to sell or I’d have to buy your half from you which I can’t afford, and I am  _ never  _ selling this baby. This house is going to our grandkids.”

“ _ Our  _ grandkids?”

“You know what I mean.” Georgie slurped up her risotto. “Honestly, your health insurance is so good I might just marry you for that. If Melanie wouldn’t kill me.”

“Why did we ever break up,” Jon said sarcastically, but then he realized that he didn’t remember. Georgie must have realized the same thing, because she stopped short too. 

Why had they broken up? The reason must have been good. Very good. But he just couldn’t recall. People just grow apart, but he had gone for half a decade without speaking to his childhood best friend. That was more than growing apart. That was a rift - but what had split it?

“Whoah,” Georgie whispered. “That’s freaky. I know what you mean now.”

Jon growled, punching the table. “Exactly! It’s every damn day! It’s not just my memories that’s missing, it’s me! And you too! And - and everyone! It’s not right! I won’t abide a happy falsehood over the inconvenient truth!”

“Is that truth worth hurting Gerry over?” Georgie asked sharply. “Martin? Daisy? Gertrude? How many people will you trample over to get what you want, Jon?”

None. Jon deflated. He would never pick his own happiness over somebody else’s. Georgie had always called it his martyr complex. “Let’s drop this for tonight.”

They did. They ate dinner, and then ice cream, and Gerry came back much calmer and smelling a little like cigarettes, and took his scolding by the hypocritical Georgie with good grace. 

Last time he checked, Jon thought, unmarried self-employed black women with rap sheets in homosexual relationships didn’t get to be foster parents. Not in practice, anyway. But Georgie did,  _ and  _ got custody of someone who was the  _ son of one of Jon’s employees  _ \- what were the chances? London wasn’t that small. Factoring into how Eric vocally wanted his newly rediscovered kid back yet hadn’t gotten custody, that Gerry was a born and raised paranormal hunter, and that it felt as if Gerry had always been living with them when he had first moved in five months before Jon’s accident - what was the truth? It was just too strange. 

Weird, inexplicable things happened every day, to everyone. Sometimes mannequins talked, lightning chased you down, or you fell in love with a woman who burned off your face with a kiss. Sure, that was strange, but so was gravity. Many things in life were inexplicable - that was what Jon hated the most about it. 

He had known, ever since that ridiculous Web book accidentally found its way into his hands and Christopher had nearly died, that he was not meant for normalcy. Sure, he had no idea he’d end up a cult leader, but sometimes that just happens to people. 

They watched tv and went to bed, like always, and Jon lay in bed at night, like always, imagining that if he turned on the light switch in his bedroom that he always kept off that he would be able to see, would understand the shape of Georgie’s smile and the bounce of her curls. 

But if he had that, had that good thing, would he ever have a million other good things? Would he have the laughs and jokes and warm touches of people who ought to be dead? Would Gerry be here? 

Maybe it was just his martyr complex again. But if Jon had lost his sight as a direct result of something he had done that involved the resurrection of who knows how many people...if one of those people included Gery...then good. Good. 

It seemed ridiculous, to think that Jon’s blindness was the cause of the resurrections instead of a side effect. It was ridiculous to think that Jon had anything to do with it at all. But Daisy was right, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Jon was involved. And although Gertrude was right too, that an eyesight was not an even trade for a life, Jon had betrayed his god for a reason. Maybe it had just been a very good one. 

But how on earth could someone normal like Jon grow involved in the theft of the powers of every Avatar, in the resurrection of many people, and in the complete change of his own personality? 

Had Gertrude mentioned something about rituals? 

_ Shit.  _

  
  
  


Friday rolled around so inevitably, and with it did the dinner party. 

Work was a little awkward, not that Jon had ever been very good at discerning that type of thing. Martin seemed constantly caught between Daisy’s desires and his own, so his and Jon’s interactions were mostly kept towards harmless small talk that seemed to frustrate the both of them. They were talking like acquaintances, when Jon knew that Martin was one of the greatest friends he had ever had. And maybe someone who he had once felt in a certain way about. They both wanted that again, but they were afraid to bridge it. How do you reconcile that problem? Was it even possible? 

By the time he got home from work, which he had skived off a little early, he was just in time to witness Gerry tastefully decorating and cleaning up and Georgie cooking up a storm. They knew how Tim ate - e.g., about as much as you would expect out of a six foot muscle freak. Daisy was also perpetually hungry. Jon quickly put his things away in his bedroom, and happily set about helping Georgie stir and bake as she chatted about how great it would be to see everybody again. 

It had been awhile since they were all in the same room. Georgie hadn’t known them too well before his accident, but they had all at least been friends through sheer association. It was only after the accident that it felt like they all came together - the long nights in his hospital room, the supportive get togethers at every new milestone in Jon’s rehab, the parties held after he was discharged. He knew that Basira and Melanie especially had been there for Georgie too, supporting her through it so she could put on her best face for Jon and Gerry. Tim, Sasha, and Daisy had been really great about looking after Gerry for awhile too. Jon was thankful. Those days - and, well his entire life - had been kind of all about him and supporting him, but it couldn’t have been easy for her, either. Finances were suddenly a problem again. The prospect of Jon not being able to work again. He knew that Georgie had seriously been ready to support him for the rest of her life. They hadn’t even been  _ dating _ . Then there was training with Tiresias, and on and on and on. It would be nice to get everybody together again under happier circumstances. 

Sure enough, Georgie was in the middle of going on about how she was looking forward to being a bridesmaid when Jon felt his, for lack of a better word, spider-sense tingle. He straightened, turning his body towards the door, and Georgie laughed. 

“You hear something, boy?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Sure enough, the doorbell rang immediately afterwards. Gerry immediately dropped the vacuum, clamoring towards the door. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it!”

The key turned, the door unlatched, and swung open. A warm, deep voice boomed throughout the house, and Jon couldn’t fight a smile. 

“Gerry, good lord! Is that you?”

“It’s great to see you, Tim! Hi, Sasha!” Gerry sounded like he was beaming, and Jon let himself imagine the stretch of a smile across his face. “Did you bring presents from Europe?”

“Oh, how I am reduced to a gift giving machine!” Tim made a pained sound, as if an arrow had struck his heart, but it was ruined by another laugh. “C’mere, you. You’re so big! I swear you’ve shot up a foot since I last saw you.”

“You liar,” a new voice soft, soft and sweet. “It must at least be a foot and a half.”

“You really think so?” Gerry said proudly. “I think I am getting pretty tall! Feel my handshake, it’s all strong!”

Despite Tim’s faux-agonized scream at the power of Gerry’s handshake, Jon frowned. Who was the woman? Didn’t he say that he was only bringing Sasha? Maybe a new friend? Jon stepped away from the stove, turning the heat down and wiping his hands on a towel. He heard the sounds of Georgie hugging the other woman, talking about how it’s been since they saw each other, and trailed a hand against the wall as he walked into the foyer. 

“There’s the man,” Tim said, still audibly grinning. “You look fantastic, Jon. Can I give you a hug too?”

“Of course, Tim,” Jon said, and stepped forward to let Tim carefully give him a masculine hug. It was tight, and the smell of his cologne was overpowering. He must have bought a new one. That got Jon, somehow - that he didn’t recognize the scent of his cologne. “It’s so good to have you over again. I hope Europe was as exciting as you hoped.”

“Absolutely nothing happened. It was wonderful.” The woman’s voice again, wry with understanding. She stepped forward too, heels clicking on the tile of the foyer. “Can I have a hug too, Jon? It’s so good to see you again. Tim’s right, you look fantastic.”

Uh. Jon took a step back. He hated it when random people felt like they could touch him. Random old ladies kept on grabbing his hand and trying to pray for him in public, it was atrocious. “Sorry, do I know you?”

Awkward silence descended over the room. He could only imagine the looks everyone was shooting each other, and Jon abruptly panicked over him having a secret friend that he had completely forgotten. 

“It’s Sasha, Jon,” the woman said evenly, calmly and without judgement. “Hopefully my voice hasn’t changed  _ that  _ much in Europe.”

“No, I know what Sasha sounds like,” Jon said firmly. He oriented his head towards Georgie, silently asking for backup. “Sasha’s voice is completely different. Is this some kind of joke? It’s not funny.”

“Fuck,” Gerry said, voice full of dawning realization. Of what?

“Nobody’s pranking you,” Georgie said quickly, fully aware of how sensitive Jon was about that. “Jon, I promise it’s really Sasha. It’s been awhile since we’ve hung out with her, but you remember the phone call we had while they were in Switzerland? You heard her voice then, right? Doesn’t it sound the same?”

“It doesn’t,” Jon said sharply, fully aware he was getting a bit too worked up. “It sounds completely different. Are you all making fun of me?”

“There’s the ol’ Jon Sims paranoia,” Tim joked weakly. “Look, mate, I only make fun of you to your face. Sasha and I have known you since day one, man. Look, have you had a hit on the head recently…?”

“His TBI hasn’t shown symptoms in years,” Georgie said, abruptly worried. “Do you think that it’s a problem?”

“I can’t do this again,” Gerry said, voice rising in a steady panic. 

“Enough of this,” the woman claiming to be Sasha said curtly. She stepped forward, and Jon smelled a perfume that was finally familiar. That was Sasha’s perfume, the same one. Then why…? “Hold out your hand, please, Jon.”

Dumbly, he did so, and he felt a large and smooth hand press something into it. He immediately tested its shape, using his other hand to explore it. Small, thin wires, smooth glass he was smudging. A little plastic nob. They were a pair of glasses, small and delicate. Jon realized, with a start, that they were Sasha’s glasses. 

“Sasha…?” Jon breathed. 

“Here, can I raise your hand?” The woman took his hands in hers and raised them up, letting them brush against her hair. Jon quickly separated his hands again and rubbed a lock of hair. It was thick and curly, the kind that a brush would get lost in. Right, of course. Sasha’s hair. She guided her hands down their length, and he felt that they were down to her waist. “Here. Long, curly hair, my small glasses you used to make fun of me for. My face is round, my smile is just a bit too big for my mouth, skin’s just a bit lighter than yours, and you think I am far better with computers than I really am. Sound familiar, Jon?”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Jon breathed. “I’m sorry about that. It’s you. I just - I just got confused for a second.” Abruptly, awfully, he felt humiliated. He quickly withdrew his hands, still clutching her glasses. “I apologize. I don’t know what came over me.”

“No harm done,” Tim said, quick as ever to smooth things over. “How’s school going, Gerry? Get any more detentions?”

“Never in my life,” Gerry said quickly, and just like that the moment was over. Jon returned Sasha’s glasses, Tim started talking about some sort of sports game with Georgie, and Sasha asked after Gerry’s new interest in historical fiction. They migrated to the living room, where they all sat down on couches, Georgie grabbed everyone some beers and Jon a soda, and Gerry fled upstairs when the adults started talking about boring things. They hung out and talked and caught up - Tim had a million funny stories about every city they had stopped at, and Sasha had wry more realistic corrections to each outlandish tale - until Jon’s sixth sense went off and Georgie went up to go answer the door before Basira and Daisy could walk in. 

“Hullo, all, I come bearing sugar,” Basira announced, walking inside. “Tim, holy shit! You’ve gotten even more jacked. Sasha, you look so lovely.”

“Everybody tell Jon how jacked I am,” Tim said smugly. 

“He’s very proud of it,” Sasha said, with long suffering candor. 

“He’s a little jacked,” Georgie admitted, in the interest of fairness. 

“Hullo,” Daisy said shortly. She didn’t like announcing her presence in rooms, but she always did it when Jon was around. “Tim. Sasha.”

“It’s so good seeing you, Daisy,” Sasha said. “I love what you’ve done with your hair.”

“Took a knife to it.”

“It’s so charming.”

Then Tiresias came bounding up, and Daisy dropped everything she was doing and every ounce of attention she had for everybody else in order to commune with Jon’s guide dog. She never even acknowledged him when he was working, but when the harness came off her obsession with him shone through. Jon knew her well enough to know that she was now lying on the carpet of the living room, letting Tiresias wag his tail and bounce all over her, in utter peace with the universe. 

“I’m getting her a husky for Christmas,” Basira whispered to Jon, as she walked over to give him a hug. “Don’t tell her.”

“Mum’s the word.”

Melanie was last, late as always despite spending half her time at Jon’s house, letting herself in with her own key. She arrived by herself, but made up for it by exchanging an obnoxiously loud kiss with Georgie just to annoy him. 

“Evening, all,” Melanie announced loudly, as Georgie giggled. “Tim, holy shit, you’ve gotten jacked. Sasha, he almost deserves you.”

There was the painfully familiar sound of hands slapping, and he knew that Melanie and Tim were exchanging their overcomplicated masculine handshake again. 

“Murder Elias yet?” Tim asked playfully. 

“Give me time,” Melanie retorted. “He’s only in what, Greece? Motherfucker can’t hide from me forever.”

“There are children present, Mels,” Sasha faux-scolded, laughing. 

“Gerry’s upstairs, I can say whatever the fuck I want.”

“I meant Jon.”

“Oh, fair enough. Sorry for offending your delicate ears, Jon.”

“I need those,” Jon groused, but accepted her hair ruffle with a smile. 

Then they were all there, together again. Close friends, for most of them the only close friends they had ever had. Working together for close to a decade, in constant limited contact with only each other, their friendship had survived a pressure cooker of stress and anxiety. Jon found it a miracle that they still talked to him, frankly. 

They had fought, a lot. Tim thought he was too neurotic, Melanie thought he was too conciliatory, as an adherent to the ancient religions Basira was uncomfortable with cultism at all, Daisy was just kind of a freak, Sasha kept a placid exterior but managed to boil over with resentment sometimes. But there was a strange kind of understanding between them: that they didn’t have to always like each other to be friends, that they could fight to death one day and have each other’s backs against enemies the next. Their job wasn’t always safe, and sometimes it was very far from fun, but they had always been together through it. 

It was different with the new group. Jon was their boss, when he had been the equal of the assistants previously. He wasn’t always a great manager, and they tended to baby him in a way that was just weird to baby your boss. And they didn’t have the same experience that Jon had with his old coworkers, the kind where every single one of them pitched in to help Jon and Georgie and Gerry when they needed it the most. You couldn’t break that, no matter how pretentious Tim thought Jon was for not knowing the names of sports. Why was football and American football called the same thing?! It was practically made to be confusing!

Normal, easy conversation, as if Tim and Sasha had never left. Georgie sat in Melanie’s lap as Tim threw a casual arm around Sasha’s shoulders that he thought Jon didn’t notice. It was easy and old, a perfect reunion, until Jon had the sense that somebody was approaching again. He was almost ready to dismiss it until he heard the doorbell ring. 

Silence broke through the din. Jon imagined that everybody was shooting each other looks.

“Did somebody order a pizza?” Tim joked weakly. 

“I’ll grab it,” Georgie said. He heard the sound of the door opening, and the soft murmur of voices. Jon didn’t feel as if it was a stranger, so he went back to his conversation with Basira where she was letting him feel how soft her new hijab was. He didn’t even notice when Georgie walked back in and tapped him on the shoulder. She leaned in closely into his ear, breath hot. “Can I talk to you in the foyer, please?”

“Uh, sure.” Jon stood up, Georgie clutching his hand, and they went to the foyer. “Do you need me to pay the pizza guy…? Who ordered pizza?”

“You,” Georgie said brittley, “either have a stalker, or have fucked up.”

“What?”

“I can go,” a new voice said, and Jon realized with a shock that it was Martin. “I’m sorry, I must have heard him wrong. I could have sworn he said Friday at eight. It’s my fault.”

Jon Knew, as he Knew things, that if Jon said the word then Daisy would kick him out in a heartbeat. This was a man Georgie had never seen before in her life. Tim, Melanie, and Daisy were all very jacked and very conscientious of protecting their girlfriends and the blind man from weird dudes who nobody trusted. But he also knew, in a way that was all his own, that it wasn’t right. 

“It’s my fault,” Jon said suddenly. “I forgot that we were having this party when I invited him. It’s all on me.”

“I can go,” Martin said again. He didn’t sound upset or embarrassed. Just very, very resigned. Eager to save everybody the embarrassment of knowing him. Jon had the sense that Martin had been Lonely for a very long time. 

“No,” Jon said, surprising himself. “You should be here. They’re your friends too, aren’t they?”

“What,” Georgie said. 

“What?” Martin said. 

“We’re celebrating Tim and Sasha’s engagement,” Jon said quietly. “Don’t tell them we know yet. She’s here, Martin. She’s really, really here.”

He hadn’t known it until he said it, that Sasha had been gone. That in that other world Sasha was gone, and that’s why he hadn’t recognized her. The confirmation was in Martin’s sharp intake of breath, the way Georgie clutched Jon’s hand. 

A faint meow, and a purring sound. Martin made a shocked noise, and Jon cracked a grin, knowing that The Admiral was winding around Martin’s legs in his typically overfriendly way. 

“See,” Jon said, “somebody remembers you.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But it was worth it in the way that Martin gasped, a little wet, and the way The Admiral’s purrs intensified. “Good kitty.”

“I’ll go tell the others that we have a visitor,” Georgie said. “I’ll say - uh, it was your idea, you two are great friends, you want him to meet your other friends since you’re new in town. Daisy’ll keep her mouth shut. Blackwood, uh...nice meeting you?”

“ _ Please  _ just call me Martin.”

“You look more like a Blackwood,” Georgie said thoughtfully. “You have that kind of face, you know? The face that says, I’m British and I’m not afraid to use it. Nobody talk to me or ask me about my feelings, I  _ will  _ make the conversation about the weather. You look like you were raised in a finishing school.”

“You’re exactly the same,” Martin said dumbly. “Did you know that you smashed in Elias’ skull with a cricket bat?”

“Okay, I take everything back, you’re my best friend,  _ please  _ tell me about this later. I’m leaving the room, come into the living room once I’m done explaining.”

Jon let her kiss his cheek, and he waited awkwardly for her to leave the room and talk to the others in a low voice. He felt very awkward, and more than a little embarrassed. 

“I’m sorry -” he began. 

“Look, I know this is -” Martin said simultaneously. 

They both fell short, and couldn’t help but laugh a little. It was awkward, but comfortable in some way too. There was something about Martin that made Jon feel so soft and warm inside he couldn’t bear it. It was an alien feeling, foreign to himself. It amplified every feeling he felt for him: happiness, joy, exasperation, frustration, hurt. It just made everything so much. Jon almost couldn’t bear it. 

“You have a nice house,” Martin said. “It looks, actually, mostly the same, kinda different?”

“Rearrange any of the furniture and you die,” Jon said lightly. “And yeah, it’s great. Don’t know how we ever afforded it.”

“You said that Gerry swapped it for a Death Cab for Cutie CD from Michael.”

“Mike Crew?” Jon asked, surprised. “That was nice of him. How did a teenager buy a multimillion house for a CD?”

“No, Michael Shelley. Huh. Guess Mike Crew’s still kicking, if everybody’s still kicking.” Martin hummed slightly. “Guess he was still absorbing Helen at that point. Had the house listings...didn’t really know the value of them…”

“ _ What _ ?”

“I really have a lot to tell you.”

“I almost don’t want to know.”

Loudly, they heard Tim say, “Who the fuck is Martin Blackwood?”

Jon winced. He felt as if Martin did too. 

“Does he still hate you?” Martin asked sympathetically. 

“What? No.” The prospect of Tim hating Jon was, while not completely unimaginable, slightly upsetting. “He’s like the older brother I never had. I’m pretty sure he calls me the annoying little brother he never had regularly, as though he doesn’t whine about Danny being overly perfect for hours.”

“Ah,” Martin said softly. “Danny. Right. What’s he up to?”

“Last time I checked, opening a CBD shop in Spain.” Jon shrugged. “I still don’t think Tim’s forgiven us for going on a few dates, but like, can you blame me?”

“I certainly can’t,” Martin said, but Georgie must have poked her head in and nodded, because he made soft sound. “Right. Georgie, uh, motioned her head for us to go in. I blame you for this.”

“You’re right to.”

“But...thank you.” Martin’s voice softened again. “What does Sasha look like? Never mind, stupid question. I never thought I’d get to find out, you know?”

This was something that Jon gave to Martin, this second chance. This was something that Jon gave Sasha. It was him, or at least he had somehow been involved. Wasn’t that good? Wasn’t that worth it? 

It seemed as if the only person who wasn’t happy in this new world was Martin. Maybe Jon too, in his own way. 

“Where have you been for the past three years?” Jon found himself asking. But all he heard in reply was the creak of a door, and Jon hurried to catch up with him. He would have to train Martin to announce when he was entering and leaving, the same way everybody else had to. It was weird, that somebody could know so much of Jon and not know something as basic as that. 

He stepped into the living room behind Martin, whose waves of anxiety were almost palatable. Jon settled for waving cheerfully, knowing that he could only do so because he could not see the death glare Daisy was undoubtedly giving Martin. He often entertained himself by imagining what everybody was doing. He always had a very active imagination. Oftentimes he was extremely wrong, but hey - how would he know? 

“Uh, I forgot to mention,” Jon said, the picture of innocent sheepishness. “I invited Martin over. He’s a bit new to town, so be welcoming, please.”

“Hullo,” Martin said, presumably awkwardly waving a hand. 

Dead silence. 

“Well!” Sasha said finally. “Nice to meet you, Martin. I’m Sasha James, and the muscle brained idiot who’s glaring too hard is Tim Stoker. How do you know Jon?”

“W - work?” Martin’s throat constricted a little, choking him strangely. “It’s nice to meet you, Sasha. Really.”

“You too?”

“Tiresias,” Daisy said, “you’re the only bitch in this house who doesn’t test me.” Tiresias barked. “True facts, Tiresias.”

Yep, both he and Martin were dead. 

But it wasn’t that bad, in the end. Georgie expertly shuffled people around so Martin was sat next to Jon, and far away from a Tim who kept on grilling him about his extremely sketchy past and his relationship to Jon, and Daisy, who it turned out was the most terrifying when she refused to acknowledge you. It was impossible for Basira and Melanie not to pick up on the tension from their SOs, but they awkwardly ignored it. Sasha was beautiful and special as always, and warm and friendly towards Martin. She was the first one who had been since...well, since Jon met him. 

“Gerry came downstairs, saw Martin, and bolted,” Georgie whispered in his ear. “How do they know each other?”

“He’s not a big fan of strangers,” Jon pointed out, equally low. 

He could hear her scowl. “Doubt they’re strangers.”

Jon couldn’t argue. 

But eventually the oven dinged, cheerily yelling out how ‘Your timer is ready. It is eight thirty pm. Your timer is ready.” Everyone got up, still talking easily and swigging beers, and migrated towards the familiar dinner table. Jon preferred the kitchen table, but their house was literally so fancy it had space in the kitchen for an informal dining room and a formal dining room. They were that kind of insufferable yuppie. 

Jon sat down at his usual place closest to the door, Georgie sitting at her usual place on his right to help him with his plate and passing him whatever he would need. There was some weird scuffling of the chair to his left, going back and forth a bit, and Jon turned his head to hear the faint sound better when he heard someone drop into the chair next to him. 

“Don’t mind if I sit here, do you, Jon?” Tim asked. 

“You always sit there,” Jon said, confused. 

“No need to be passive aggressive,” Martin muttered, and sat someplace else. 

Gerry sped downstairs to collect his food, and politely suffered through small talk with a Basira who was grilling him about his grades and a Melanie who jokingly refused to give him a knife unless he could snatch it from her grip. For all Jon knew, Daisy was still lying on the ground with Tiresias. 

Plates were placed on the table, Jon pretended to care about sportsball when Tim kept nattering on about it, and Melanie loudly started talking about her new job at a bank. She was always hopping, never quite finding something that fit, and Jon secretly hoped she’d come back to work at the Archives. Even if it would be a little weird. 

“Dinner is served,” Georgie announced grandly, “starring today is beautiful roast beast, mashed potatoes, cranberry tart, wet stuffing, and gorgeous dinner rolls. Bon appetit, kids.”

“Oh, you really went all out, Georgie,” Sasha said. “This looks amazing.”

“I had the day off,” Georgie said proudly. “And I made the most bitching risotto the other day too. But Jon totally beat that out with his eggplant lasagna yesterday.”

“The culinary world is within my grasp,” Jon said dryly. “As long as it does not involve hot oil.”

“We make Gerry chop things,” Georgie stage whispered. “He doesn’t have any more fingertips to lose.”

“You’ve been cutting off your fingertips?” Martin asked, alarmed. “Jon!”

“They stitch back,” Jon said guiltily. “It was only the one time.”

“Two times,” Georgie said.

“Thumb doesn’t count.”

“Knife safety is like gun safety, Jon,” Basira lectured. “You never point it at anyone you’re not trying to kill.”

“We’re serving turkey, Basira, not pig,” Georgie said sweetly, making everybody ‘oooh’ quietly. 

“You do not want to declare war in front of your husband, girlfriend, and child,” Basira said. “You will not win that fight. It will not look good for you.”

“Apparently I beat Elias’ head in with a baseball bat,” Georgie said proudly. “Beat that, sister!”

“You did  _ what _ ?” Melanie cried. “Without  _ me _ ?”

“Why do you hate him so much?” Martin asked suspiciously. “I thought he didn’t have creepy mind powers now.”

“The fuck you on about, newbie? Dude’s just a creep. Creepy, creepy, creepy.” Melanie huffed. “It’s a miracle I stayed on as long as I did. I bounced the second I found a better job.”

“You were unemployed when you bounced,” Jon said flatly, still unimpressed with it.

“Well, why else would I wait that long?”

“Why indeed,” Martin muttered, unfortunately not helping his case about being creepy. 

“Can we go back to you committing potential manslaughter against my ex-boss,” Melanie said flatly. “Just take a nice rewind there?”

“Wish I had thought of that,” Tim said, almost to himself. “Why didn’t I quit earlier? I hated that dumb job. Oh, no offense, Jon.”

“None taken.”

“Why did I even sign up?” Tim asked, a bit louder. “I worked in publishing. Then I worked there, for  _ so  _ much of my life, and then I just go back to publishing? What happened?”

“Here we go again,” Sasha muttered. 

“It just doesn’t make any sense!”

“Ask Danny,” Martin said under his breath. 

“How the fuck do you know who my brother is?”

“I mentioned him,” Jon said quickly. “Please, let’s just say grace.”

Everybody groaned. 

But it was Jon and Georgie’s house, and they both understood that in a gathering this big it was only proper. Everybody held hands - Georgie’s small and smooth in his right, Tim’s large and calloused in his left - and bowed their heads. Or didn’t, if they were Muslim or an athiest. Atheism was a political statement, but Melanie was just like that. Only she could work in the Eye’s temple and then just go, “Nah, you’re not real”. It was hilarious. 

“The Great Watcher sees all, knows all, controls all,” Jon said rotely. “With the power of...life or death, of light and darkness, we offer ourselves and everything we are. We, former and current adherents and supplicants to its power, gather here today. Old friends and new. We gather today to offer thanks: that we are still here, that we have survived another day, that we have returned to each other. It is not a guaranteed thing. Nothing in life is guaranteed. We supplicate to you. We rebel against you. Always. Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, and his assistants old and new are, as ever, your loyal servants.”

They broke hands. 

“I’m not!” Melanie called loudly, presumably to the ceiling. 

“Yeah, fuck you!” Tim said, equally loudly. 

“There is no God but God,” Basira muttered. 

“Ugh,” Daisy said. 

“I forgot how much fun it was hanging out with Head Priests,” Sasha said mildly. The mildness was bullshit, she was just as much an atheist as Melanie was. “Traditions in different homes are so unique. I hear Julia Montauk goes outside and shoots something before every meal.”

“I want to stress, yet again, that is perfectly theologically valid to say the words and then turn around and deny them,” Jon said, exasperated. “”It’s just important to acknowledge that the Eye is real and that we do live by its whims, and that by denying it you’re very deliberately turning away from its vision and unholy light.”

“It obviously controls every aspect of our lives,” Tim said scornfully. “It’s just a  _ dick _ .”

“Fair.”

“What about you, Martin?” Basira asked. “You got any...Lonely type stuff to do or whatever? What do Lonely prayers involve, saying something mean to the person next to you?”

“Maybe he has to go do them in the woods,” Tim laughed. 

“I don’t follow the Lonely,” Martin said tightly. “I worked as Peter Lukas’ personal assistant for a while, and then I left because I fucking hated him. The end. That’s it.”

Jon...hadn’t known that. He stopped short, and most everyone else did too. 

Tim didn’t. “Peter Lukas? That asshole? How’d you put up with  _ that _ ?”

“Same way I put up with you, Tim,” Martin said sweetly. “Very carefully.”

Basira and Daisy ‘ooh’d under their breaths. 

“You know,” Tim said, voice slowly escalating. “I am really sick of your attitude, Martin.”

“Haven’t heard that one before,” Martin said brightly. It was amazing, the way he spat venom at you while sounding perfectly chipper about it. “I guess I’m sick of getting into pissing contests with you.”

“That’s your problem,” Tim said, “you’re always willing to sit back and let someone else take care of it. You never step up. As if some tea will always fix everything.”

“It’s more than you do, which is purposefully upset everyone else.”

“Why are you two fighting?” Basira asked, deeply confused. “You don’t know each other.”

“Forgive me for not playing nice with people I don’t trust,” Tim ground out. 

“You don’t trust anyone,” Martin said evenly. “You never have. Not since Sasha - right. Right. Never mind. Let’s just eat.”

Everybody sat in awkward silence, deeply confused. 

“Since I...what?” Sasha asked. “Are you two sure you don’t know each other?”

“Knew you would do this, Blackwood,” Daisy grunted. 

“Blame Tim,” Martin snapped. 

“No, Martin’s right,” Tim said suddenly. He sounded just as confused as everyone else. “I don’t know where that...where that came from. I just look at you, and I feel...a lot of things?”

“Most people do,” Martin said, sounding very depressed about it.

“I just...you know it’s weird.” Tim was pausing, almost stuttering over his words, hesitant when he never was. “The way you...and Jon...never mind.”

“The way he what?” Jon asked. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Tim said quickly. “Let’s just eat.”

“I agree,” Martin said. “Basira, what was it you said you did?”

“I’m a PI,” Basira said, clearly just desperately glad to move on. “It’s boring, mostly just a lot of catching bail jumpers. But lately we’ve been taking on some paranormal work. Flushing out vampire dens, disposing of Leitners, that kind of thing.”

“Leitners? That asshole?”

“Oh, yeah. Daisy hates him. Nearly ripped his face off the last time she saw him. Last time I checked, he was hiding in his stupid Norwegian neo-mod home. Dickhead.”

“He’s a dickhead,” Daisy muttered. 

“I agree completely,” Martin said quickly. “Peter had this one copy of a Leitner, whenever you touched it makes everyone around you completely convinced that you’re an imposter pretending to be yourself, even your family and friends. I think it’s from the Stranger or something. Just terrible, some guy found it and when he went home his husband called the police on him. Thought he was a burglar.”

“Wow, that’s shitty. Remind me to use my nightstick on him next time I see him.”

That was how Martin and Basira got deeply wrapped up in a conversation about books and studying. Georgie piled up Jon’s plate as Tim easily filled his glass with water, clearly still fuming. Jon didn’t know what to say, or if he should even say anything. 

But, surprisingly, it was Tim who spoke first. “Sorry. It’s not very adult to make a scene at someone you barely know.”

“It sounded as if you knew each other quite well,” Jon said noncommittally. 

“It did, didn’t it? That’s how it felt. I just look at him and I think...god, that’s a guy who’s always trying to make everyone tea. It infuriates me. I don’t know why.” Tim stopped, huffed an exhale, and started again. “I’m being irrational. At least, I think I am. But never mind that. How are you Jon, are the new guys treating you alright? They aren’t bullying you, are they?”

“Or what, you’ll beat them up?” Jon asked wryly. “And no, they’re lovely. The only person they’re bullying is Martin.”

“He deserves it.”

“Really, Tim?”

“Sorry. But that’s good, really. I worry about you, you know.”

“I know, Tim.”

“You’re so bad with people.”

“Thanks, Tim.”

“I look at you in public and I’m filled with a secondhand horror at the sight of you interacting with another human being. It’s quite bad. You’re so awkward it goes right around into endearing. But then it goes into annoying again. I don’t know how you’re friends with every supernatural entity in Britain and also all of your ex-coworkers and your subordinates. It’s a miracle, honestly.”

“Your nuggets of wisdom astound me, Tim.”

“Right, right, sorry.”

Then Tim segued into a funny story about how they ended up visiting a small town they remembered from a Statement, and how Sasha ended up beating up one of those creepy mannequins with a cricket bat. Jon actually remembered that one - Sasha had phoned about it afterwards, wanting to know what was the name of the man who helped rescue the Statement giver. They were confident it was some kind of Leitner hunter, and his name seemed important, but they just couldn’t remember. Jon knew the Statement they were talking about - hard not to, when he had spent twenty minutes staring at the wall and wondering if the thoughts of Georgie and Gerry were enough to bring him home - but he couldn’t remember the name of the man either. And when he tried searching for it, he just couldn’t find it. It was so bizarre, he had ended up asking the Beholding about it. He only received static. Oh, well. 

Daisy had finally deigned to sit at a table, loudly chomping as Georgie chatted with her about the best brands of mace to use as self-protection. Sasha was talking with Melanie about their respective difficulties in finding careers, and how they were thinking of going back to school. Basira and Martin truly seemed to be hitting it off, which would make Basira the first person besides Jon that Martin had ever hit it off with. And as Tim told a story in Jon’s ear, he realized how content he was. 

This was good. No, it was more than good. It was complete. It was all of them together, in a way that they had never truly been. Why did this, out of all things, feel right? None of their lives were perfect, but somehow it felt as if they could get there someday. 

Finally, as dinner seemed to be wrapping up and Georgie was going around pouring everybody some more wine, Tim loudly clapped his hands. “We actually have a reason for dropping by London at this time,” he announced grandly. “Sasha and I just wanted to tell you all that we’re thinking of settling down in the area again. It’s pretty much the best place in Britain to get publishing work, and we both really love the city. Of course, you all being here is a happy side-effect.”

“Woo!” Melanie hollered. “We can finally all go out for drinks again!”

“We also have one other announcement,” Sasha said. “We - Georgie?”

“Keep talking,” Georgie said mischievously, “I just need to get something from the kitchen.”

“Alright, then. I just wanted to let you all know that Tim and I have a special announcement. You’re all some of our oldest friends, so we wanted to have you guys hear it before Facebook or anything.” Sasha took a deep, excited breath. “Tim and I are...engaged!”

Dead silence. 

“Pay up,” Daisy said, presumably to Basira. 

“Ugh, I totally thought it would be a baby,” Basira said, rustling her wallet. 

“Aw, you already knew?” Tim said, crushed. “Who spilled -  _ Jon _ .”

“Congratulations!” Georgie cried, walking back in. “We made you a cake about it!”

“Jonathan Sims, I’m going to kill you!”

Then Sasha started crying out of happiness that her friends made her a happy engagement cake, and then all of the girls actually got over their shock and started squealing and hugging her and jumping up and down - presumably, some things about womanhood Jon just didn’t understand - and Martin made polite noises of congratulations that sounded strangely choked up as Tim clapped Jon on the shoulder. 

“Beat you to it,” Tim said lightly. “You’re such a little sneak, I can’t believe you peeked.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jon retorted. But he leaned over and hugged Tim tightly anyway, breathing in the new scent of his cologne, determined it memorize it as the new smell of who Tim was. “Congratulations, mate. You two are perfect for each other, and everyone knows it. You’re going to have a long and happy marriage.”

“Is that a well-wish or a prophecy?” Tim teased. 

“It’s a promise,” Jon said firmly. “There are no such things as prophecy. There’s only the path that has been laid out for us, and whether or not we choose to follow it. You’ve never been good at playing by other people’s rules, Tim. Whatever future you have, whatever happiness you make for yourself, it will be through your and Sasha’s hands. Destiny has no role here. Your happiness and your life is your own.”

“That was a little intense, but thanks, mate. Thanks.” Tim hugged him again, tightly. “I just feel so fucking lucky. I’m not going to waste this fantastic chance. Also, uh, that Martin bloke’s staring again.”

“Does he do that?”

“Mate, you have no idea.”

They cut the cake, which was indeed very good, and everybody relaxed into old fights and conversations over bottles of wine. Melanie and Tim got into the best way to kill a man again, and then Basira and Daisy had to throw in their cop two cents. Georgie and Melanie talked about podcasting, and Jon wished he was just a little closer to Martin, so it would be easier to say something to him. He would have to really, really apologize for this. 

“Does anybody want to play cards in the living room?” Georgie called out. “I’m going to fleece all of you if you do!”

“You are so fucking on, sweetie,” Melanie said. “I’m getting my bra back!”

“Not on your life.” Georgie patted Jon’s arm. “Want to join us? We’ll use your deck.” Yours, as in, the one with the raised letters and braille along with pictures. “But you don’t get to bet, because you cheat.”

“Far be it from me to deprive you of your underwear,” Jon said dryly. “I’ll pass, thank you. I think I’m going to sit outside for a bit and decompress.”

“I’ll come with you,” Tim volunteered. “I told Gerry I’d play some basketball with him.”

On one hand, Jon kind of wanted to be alone, but on the other hand Jon was incredibly grateful to Tim for doing physical stuff with Gerry that Jon just couldn’t. Jon couldn’t exactly be the kind of parent who teaches their kid how to drive. Some old fashioned, sportsmanlike male bonding would be good for them. Gerry had always worshipped Tim. 

Tim went upstairs to grab Gerry, and Jon moved to the back yard. It was small, as was typical for London, but it had enough room for a basketball hoop in the empty driveway. Jon sat on the steps leading to the back door, feeling the cool night air on his face, absentmindedly thinking about letting Tiresias out so he could frolic. Dog didn’t get enough fun. 

“ - sure, we can drop by all the time,” Tim was saying, as the back door opened. “We really have to work on your dribble. Jon, it’s me and Gerry. You got the ball, kid?”

“Yep! Hi, Jon! Are you going to play with us?”

“I really just wanted to sit here,” Jon said wryly. 

“No way. Up you get.” Tim gently clasped Jon’s arm, and gently lifted him up. Jon sighed, resigning himself to his fate. “Come on, we have to work on your dribble too. We’ll make a man who actually exercises out of you yet.”

“Not all of us have to be gym rats,” Jon muttered. 

“But they look so good!” Tim laughed. “Come on, Gerry, show me your two point shot.”

Tim and Gerry practiced, and then they moved onto actually convincing Jon to give it a shot shooting a basket. Jon was not into this at all, but he sighed and let them show him where to stand and how to hold the ball. He had shot a basket before. Half of his childhood was spent running from people who were trying to get him to play basketball in the street, and the other half was spent failing and being conscripted to shoot a basketball. Actually, the age when he finally put his foot down and refused to play anymore was probably when those queer rumors started going around. They stopped, mostly, when he started dating Georgie and - well. Besides a few dates here and there with perfectly nice men, nothing ever came out of that but heartache. 

“I’m going to toss the ball at the blackboard, so you can get a sense, alright?” A second later, a loud thump helped Jon orient himself. “Okay, give it a shot. I’ll let you know how you need to adjust your angle.”

“You can do it, Jon!” Gerry said. 

Jon sighed, bent his knees, held the ball by his fingertips, adjusted his elbows, and tossed the ball into the endless void. A sailing, then a thump. 

“That was pretty close,” Tim said, impressed. “Gerry’s grabbing it. Let’s give it a little shot, about - oh, twenty degrees to your left, and a bit more power.”

They shot hoops like that, missing most of them, getting a few in. Jon found himself smiling, and even kind of having fun. Eventually he bowed out so Tim could focus on Gerry, and he sat on the steps smiling as he listened to the sound of sneakers scuffing against the concrete and the grunts as Gerry gave physical activity his best shot. 

Tim would be a good dad. He knew that he and Sasha both wanted kids. They were already in their thirties, they wouldn’t wait too long. Jon was looking forward to be ‘Uncle Jon’. A baby would probably be so soft and small and smell like that unique child scent. A child, that in another life would have never existed. A wedding, where Danny would best man and Jon would groomsman, that in another world they would have never had. How could Jon begrudge anything, when he had this?

“I’m going back inside for a bit,” Gerry said, suddenly close to Jon. He was panting a little. “I want more cake and some water. Do you want me to grab you anything?”

“I’m alright. Thanks, Gerry.”

“No problem. See you, Tim!”

The door slammed shut behind him, and the cicadas whirred in their empty song. The soft sound of cars passing by the street, a thrum and a grumble, and the wind whistled through the branching trees. 

“Toss the ball back and forth with me, Jon,” Tim said. “There’s something I want to ask you about.”

Jon sighed, standing up again, and walked towards Tim’s voice until he brushed up against him before walking back several paces. He held out his hands and Tim, with excellent skill, bounced the ball against the concrete until it slapped into Jon’s hands. Jon pushed it back, same angle and direction as it came to him, and he heard the satisfying thump of it hitting Tim’s hands. 

“So,” Tim said, faux-casually. “Martin Blackwood, huh?”

“I’m not even going to ask what your problem with him is,” Jon said, exhausted. “Seeing as I suspect you don’t even know. Honestly, everybody who meets him hates him, and I have no idea why.” 

“I suppose you don’t.” Toss, thump, smack. Toss, thump, smack. “Honestly, Jon, it’s nothing about what he says or what he does. It’s just...he stares at you. A lot. It’s very uncomfortable. He stares at everyone, actually, but mostly you. Everybody’s noticed.” Tim paused, aiming for casual but not anywhere near it. “Are you two…?”

Jon flushed. “We’re...I know he’s interested, but I’m interested too. We’re still...navigating that.”

“Uh huh. How long have you known each other?”

Two weeks. Years on years on years. “I don’t appreciate the implication that I’m incapable of deciding for myself if I had a romantic interest in someone.”

“Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean it like that. But you know, none of us have ever seen you just decide that you like someone. You never initiate like this. And it’s not like you just find people attractive enough to go for it. We’re all aware that it takes you years to warm up to people. And you just deciding that this objectively super creepy guy is worth dating again when you literally haven’t had a long term relationship since Georgie...you know how it worries us, right?”

“Nothing about him being an employee?”

“Literally, the least weird thing about that place. And I know you. You’d never take advantage of anyone, or be inappropriate. The Jon I know would never even think about an employee that way. ” 

Jon just sighed. “Tim, I recognize how strange this is. It’s a situation that almost can’t even be explained. At least, I don’t know if you’d be satisfied with the explanation.”

“Try me.” Tim was quiet for a long second, before slowly saying, “You know, I really did feel like I knew him, just for a few minutes there. He feels like someone I’ve known for a very long time.” Something terrible clearly occurred to him. “I’m not getting weird Beholding powers, am I? Do I have to rejoin if I do? Jon, I’d literally rather die. I’d take Gertrude down with me in the first week.”

Jon laughed a little, but maybe this was his chance. “Why did you work at a job outside your field that you hated for so long, Tim? Why did you quit the day of my accident? Is that a coincidence?”

Tim was silent for a long moment. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t think it is. You aren’t saying that - that I…”

“No,” Jon said quickly. “No, of course not. But maybe that was...the first time that you  _ could  _ quit. Maybe my eyesight, and you and Melanie quitting, and Daisy waking up that day to find the dead walking, are all related. I think it has something to do with a ritual. The Beholding’s ritual.”

“I’m sorry, back up. The dead walking? What the fuck, Jon?”

That was the strange thing about Tim: he was more alike to Jon than either of them would prefer to admit. They both had a similar, unceasing drive for truth. Tim couldn’t bear a lie. And whatever the lie was that he was bearing, Jon knew that it had been tearing him apart for years. 

But still: a part of him didn’t want to tell Tim. Nobody deserves to know that their fiance had died in another world that didn’t matter. But it was something beyond that, too, something which Jon just didn’t understand. He felt as if Tim was at the crux of all of this, that he was an important player in some indefinable way, but he just didn’t know why. 

“Ask Daisy about it,” Jon said uncomfortably. “Basically, uh...look, it’s complicated. I don’t want to tell you if you don’t want to know. It’s a lot to know. Maybe it’s not worth knowing. If you’re happy with your life now, Tim, if everything is perfect and good for you...then you really wouldn’t be better off knowing this.”

Another long, extended silence. A door creaked open, and creaked shut. When Tim spoke again his voice was cracked, almost lost, almost desperate. 

“I have these dreams,” Tim breathed, “so many nights. I dream that I wake up and everybody around me has been replaced by someone else. I reach over to hug Sasha in bed, but she looks like somebody else. And that other person smiles at me, and tries to touch me, but it isn’t her. And nobody believes me. It’s not Sasha. And then I get out of bed, and I try to run, and I run somewhere else...and it’s Danny. Danny, smiling at me, waving. My stupid brother. But his skin sits wrong on his frame. It’s sagging and loose, like it was just - thrown on. Danny tries to talk, but he just...gargles. It’s not him. Nobody’s who they used to be. And then I look around at everyone, everyone in my life, and I can’t stop wondering if they’re wrong too. I...I kill myself, in these dreams. It’s too much, and I stab myself, and then I wake up.” Tim took a shuddering breath. “Sasha’s took me to a therapist over it, but they’re just dreams. I forget about them mostly, when I’m awake. But when I look at that Martin guy...it’s like I’m back there again.”

“Tim,” Jon said, “I don’t think this is something you want to look too deeply into. You might find out things that you were happier not knowing.”

“Am I capable of that? Have I ever been?” Tim laughed again, brittle and empty. “Stop stalking the door like a creep, Blackwood. You hear all that?”

“Enough,” Martin said, voice somber. “Listen, Tim, I -”

“Nope. Nope! Jon’s right, for once.” Another laugh, too loud and too hollow. “I don’t give a shit. If I don’t know, good. I don’t fucking want to know. It sounds like you’re the only person here who knows anything about anything, Blackwood. Well, listen. I don’t care. I don’t want my creepy fortune. My life is good. It’s finally good. I’ve finally learned how delicate that goodness can be. I’m not going to spoil it because I couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

“That’s not like you,” Martin said mildly. 

“Well, I grew up. I moved on. Even if we used to know each other, in some different life, I don’t really care. That life’s not mine. This life is. I’m going to protect it.” Tim patted Jon heavily on the back. “Jon, why don’t you make sure Gerry didn’t sneak a beer? I think I need to talk to Blackwood alone for a bit.”

Jon sighed as Martin squeaked. “Please don’t threaten him.”

“Oh, relax! We’ll have a perfectly civil conversation. If you’ll excuse us.”

Yeah, right. But Jon knew better than to argue with Tim when he got an idea in his head. Jon reached out and squeezed Martin’s shoulder for emotional support, patting him on the back. “Relax. He can’t be worse than Daisy. I’ll catch you inside, Martin.”

So, of course, Jon promptly went inside the house, before going back out the front and circling around so he could eavesdrop. He ducked behind his favorite bush, wondering if it wasn’t worth it to just use his Beholding powers to eavesdrop, but he didn’t really feel like dealing with the headache right now. Jon was a five time world champion in eavesdropping on private conversations. 

But by the time that Jon made his way over there, they had already started talking. Martin was speaking, voice cautious and tight. “ - Daisy said I absolutely wasn’t allowed to start dumping people’s lives on them. She said that people had to make the choice to remember.”

When had she said that? Jon heard the tell-tale thumps of a basketball dribbling on concrete, and the empty swoop of the ball as it sunk through the net. “Did she want to know?”

“Yeah, but Daisy’s kind of a masochist. Dunno if you noticed.”

“Good for her. Well, don’t tell me shit. I don’t care.”

“That’s not like you.”

“It’s been a long time, Blackwood. We’re all different now. I guess you’re probably different too, though fuck me if I know how. But fuck that, I wanted to talk to you about Jon.”

“I  _ already  _ got the shovel talk -”

Thump, thump, thump, swish. Rhythmic. “You’re in love with him, right?”

Long pause. Finally, definitely, “Yeah.”

“Sure. With the guy you’ve known for two weeks?”

“Years, Tim.” A short silence. “I got a crush on him from the moment I saw him the first time, actually. I had just started, he had been working in Research for a while. He just seemed so...serious. The way he bit his pen when he read all those flies. It was hard not to.”

“Great. I’m guessing he doesn’t remember this at all.” 

“I’m not going to pressure him.”

“That’s not the point,” Tim snapped, patience finally fraying. “He’s different from how you remember him, Blackwood. He has a lifetime of memories that you don’t, a lifetime without you in it, and a history that you don’t even know. You weren’t there for him after the accident, and we were. You weren’t there for him through rehab, through training, through convalescence, through getting back to work. We were. Stop pretending like you’re his very best friend when you don’t know one thing about the Jon Sims that’s in front of you. You know we didn’t even know if he was going to be able to get his old job back? It involves  _ quite  _ a lot of filing paperwork. What would he have done, then? He has no family besides us. Georgie couldn’t support the both of them and Gerry just on her salary. Sasha and I were ready to ask for our old jobs back that we fucking hated so he could move in with us.”

“Tim -”

“Are you just looking for a casual thing? Or are you looking long term?”

“How is this any of your business?” Martin asked. But then he paused, and said, “Long term. Definitely. As long as he’ll have me, I think.”

“I can tell you’re a romantic,” Tim said scornfully. “But love doesn’t always conquer all, Blackwood. What happens if he loses his job now? It’s difficult for him to find work. As his partner, would you be alright with supporting him? What if his TBI gets worse and he can’t work at all? Could you support him then? What about long term? There are some things he can’t do as a parent that you would have to do. He can’t always support you if you’re in an accident or you get sick. These were  _ all  _ things we had to think about. It’s the rest of Jon’s life. Me, Sasha, Basira, Daisy, Melanie, and Georgie all sat down and talked about it, over and over again. Georgie’s job is fickle, and Melanie’s work isn’t very stable either. Him living with me and Sasha has always been the backup plan for emergencies. Georgie got sick with pneumonia a few months ago, she was in bed for two weeks. Daisy moved in, slept on the couch for two weeks so she could help Jon and Gerry while Georgie can’t. We’re a family. We depend on each other. Just loving someone doesn’t mean that you know their lives.”

Was that why Daisy had stayed over? She had said that she was fighting with Basira. Jon was a little offended, but mostly he just felt very strange. He didn’t know that they thought about him like this. As a...forever kind of thing. 

“He is different,” Martin said finally, almost confessing. “He’s...kinder. I think the world’s been kinder to him. He doesn’t twitch when he sees - or, uh, hears people drinking alcohol anymore. He always used to do that. But, Tim, do you love Sasha because you know her inside and out, and know her entire life and everything about her? Or do you just love her because she’s her?”

Tim was silent. 

“I like Jon for Jon,” Martin said. “I always have. You’re right, things are different from the way they used to be. But that’s life. Everything else...we’ll figure it out. I don’t have to, like, know and understand everything. I just have to know what I want. And I want this. I think he does too.” He took a deep breath as the basketball dribbled. “I know you’re protective because you were all he had for a long time. And I know that he’s all  _ you  _ had for awhile -”

“That’s not -”

“Let me guess. Your life felt directionless, purposeless, confused? Then something bad happened that really solidified your relationship with your partner, with your friends? You all rallied together and became a family? And now that you aren’t needed anymore, that Jon’s life is back on track and he doesn’t need you babying him, you don’t know what to do?”

“You’re fucking creepy,” Tim groused. 

“I’m not wrong. His life doesn’t exist for you, anymore than it exists for me. I think we all sacrificed far too much so we could just live for ourselves.” Martin exhaled slowly. “I’ve been alone for a long time, Tim. It was...good for me. I was too used to defining myself by taking care of other people. It had always kinda been my thing. But when I tried that with Jon, I got really chewed out. It’s...almost a relief. I’m looking forward to that new start for us. And, uh, maybe for you and me too?” His voice softened. “It’s okay if you don’t believe me, but...we were friends. I mean, you thought I was annoying and I thought you were self-absorbed, but some things you can’t just go through without becoming friends, and an attack of evil worms is one of them.”

“Harry Potter, really?”

“It’s a classic for a reason.”

Tim grunted, and the swoosh of a ball through a net echoed throughout the gently buzzing backyard. “You know how to shoot a basket, Blackwood?”

“I can learn?”

“Never too late.”

Jon quietly snuck back into the house. He was being hypocritical after all: when you eavesdropped, sometimes you heard things that you didn’t want to hear. 

It was true. They were a loose association of adults, none of which in stable jobs or gainful employment. Ironically, it was basically only Jon who had a retirement plan and tenure. Sure, Tim and Sasha were making their own life together, finding their own version of stability, but they had been swanning around like uni students on gap year for the past two and a half years. Publishing was hard to find jobs in, and Sasha was thinking of going back to school. Melanie hadn’t found a career yet, and although Basira and Daisy enjoyed being PIs the work didn’t exactly pay well. Georgie was a freaking podcast host - a successful one, but self-employment was never easy. 

There was one thing that all of them had in common, when they all came from different walks of life. It was that they were alone. None of them, when they had begun working at the Institute, had friends or family. Tim had come the closest, but he and Danny only rekindled their relationship recently. Sasha’s parents were still in Cuba, and she hadn’t seen them in almost a decade. Melanie was an orphan, like Jon and Daisy. Basira’s own relationships with her parents were strained and non communicative. They were a generation lost in space, weighed down by neuroses and trauma, who had just barely found each other. 

But they had made the decision, somewhere within the long dark months where Jon was stuck in the ruts of grief and horror, that whatever they had, they would share with him. It was something more than what friends did. Maybe, if any of them had friends and family outside of each other, they wouldn’t have done it at all. But none of them did, so Daisy made up a bullshit story about fighting with Basira so she could help him get around. He hadn’t asked, but she had known. How could Martin come close to that? Martin, who none of them knew?

The old Jon, in the vague sketches of his face and personality that Jon knew, was different from who Jon now. Everybody changed. Some more than others. What had Martin meant, about him never twitching at alcohol anymore? Why did Jon never drink? What had split him and Georgie up? 

Did it matter? Martin thought it did. Jon wanted to think it did too. He wanted to know the Jon that Martin had fell in love with, what about him was so beautiful. Nobody had fallen in love with Jon in a very long time. People loved him, many people, but in love…? Jon hadn’t known that was possible. 

Back inside, he found the girls playing cards and gossiping unabashedly. Usual girltalk: wedding dresses, flowers, venues, the ritual sacrifice of a goat to bless your union. Georgie and Melanie were arguing about who got to kill the goat - normally it was the Maid of Honor, but when a member of the bridal party was Slaughter aligned they got first dibs, and although Melanie refused to acknowledge the Slaughter that didn’t mean that she was not occasionally crazed by bloodlust. 

He sat down in the first available spot he found, only to realize that it was next to Daisy when she called a bluff. He relaxed against the couch, wiggling into his familiar butt imprint, and was only mildly startled when he felt a heavy weight drape itself against his shoulder. 

“Can I help you, Daisy?”

“Mmphh.”

“Had a bit too much to drink?”

“I’m going to bed. Night.” 

Then Daisy collapsed onto his lap, for all intents and purposes dead to the world, and Jon laughed as he threaded his fingers through her long, silky blonde hair. Wait. Was it a little shorter than it used to be?

“You cut your hair and didn’t tell me?” Jon said, wounded. 

“Hngh,” Daisy said, which roughly translated to ‘keep doing that’. 

So he did, laughing slightly under his breath, combing out Daisy’s hair with his fingers as Melanie and Basira drunkenly yelled at each other about card counting. Of course, the only person in the room who knew how to count cards at all was Jon, and he wasn’t telling. 

He drifted out of focus, for a while, until he heard a familiar voice near his ear. “I’m heading out. Thanks for having me, Jon. This was fun.”

“Martin. Hold on, I’ll see you out.” 

Jon gently extricated himself from Daisy, who by now had fallen asleep on his lap, and he gingerly set her down on the couch so he could walk Martin out. Jon almost tripped over Tiresias, who was chasing The Admiral again, but managed to unlock the front door and open it for Martin well enough. They stepped out onto the front porch, cold wind tousling Jon’s hair, and he abruptly felt very awkward. He closed the door behind him, heart jackrabbiting in his chest. How did people do this, again? How had he ever done this? 

“So...see - uh, catch you at work on Monday?”

“Yep,” Jon said, somewhat light headed. “You can, like, say that word. I won’t get offended.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Jon stuck his hands in his jean pockets. “Sorry Tim was giving you such a hard time.”

“It was really nothing in comparison to Melanie.”

“Good lord.” Jon groaned. “Did  _ everybody  _ -”

“Yep.”

“I’m so sorry. They’re...a lot.” Jon shrugged uncomfortably. “We’re really all each other have. They’re...not used to me doing stuff like this. But that doesn’t make their behavior acceptable.”

“It’s honestly -”

“It’s not fine,” Jon said firmly. “I’m an adult. And they wouldn’t act this way if it was, like, Georgie getting a new partner.” And, knowing Georgie, that new partner would be a psychopath. “I’ll talk with them. They’re not being fair to me or to you.”

“I have it under good authority I’m somewhat disturbing,” Martin said, with forced levity. “I’m sorry. New partner…?”

Jon flushed. “I thought you were interested.”

“I am,” Martin said quickly, “are you -”

“I told you I was.”

“I didn’t know -”

“You talk  _ way  _ too much,” Jon said, “so just kiss me.”

He did. It was...soft. And good. It made something in Jon light up and fly away. 

They seperated silently, Jon still somewhat light headed, and Martin squeaked a goodbye. Jon managed to say goodbye too, and he listened to Martin trot down the steps of his porch and recede into the night. 

Jon waited a minute, two minutes, then three. Then, hoping that nobody was passing by, Jon punched the air and screamed, “ _ Yes! _ ”

Then he felt very embarrassed. But still very proud of himself. 

What did Jon want? He wanted to feel like he belonged in his own life. He wanted to understand the world he left behind, and know what he sacrificed for it. He wanted his family close, he wanted not to be alone. But he wanted this, too. He wanted Martin, because he knew in his heart that they could have had something good, in another world. Maybe even in this one.

His memories were disconnected - running from worms, long nights at the Archives, tea every day. But they were enough. Everything important was there. It was all he needed. 

He wanted this, with Martin. It surprised him. He had felt no desire for a relationship in a decade. He hadn’t thought he would again, and he was alright with that. Guess you could never really know what life would throw at you.

Nothing about this was simple. But Jon had always liked a little challenge, anyway. 

He opened the door and stepped back inside, only to walk straight into a cloud of slightly drunk, frantically gossiping women. Basira, Sasha, and Melanie’s voices were clear, if overlapping, but they all abruptly quieted when he almost walked straight into Sasha. 

“I  _ really hope _ ,” Jon said loudly, “that we are not  _ eavesdropping  _ on my  _ personal life  _ for no good reason.”

“We aren’t eavesdropping on your personal life for no good reason,” Sasha said immediately. 

“Yeah, it’s for a great reason,” Melanie snickered. “Really, Jon? That guy? He’s all -”

“Respectful of my boundaries and my autonomy?” Jon said sharply, and everyone shut up. “Understanding that I can make my own decisions? Wow, I sure hate it when people I care about have those traits. Glad none of you are guilty of it.”

“Hey, I like him,” Basira said. “He’s smart. Good taste in literature. Even if his eyes have like, nothing underneath.”

“They’re kinda soulless,” Sasha admitted. But she reached out and squeezed Jon’s arm anyway. “I’m sorry. You’re right, we’re being shitty. If you made this decision, and we don’t have... _ reasonable  _ cause to think he’s the bad sort, we should support you.”

“Daisy’s not going to stop hating him,” Basira said frankly. “But she hates everyone, so it’s probably not a big deal.”

“I honestly just think that she thinks we should all date within the group, so she never has to deal with meeting new people, ever,” Sasha said thoughtfully. “If you and Georgie just got married I think she’d be very happy.”

“Look, guys, it’s bad enough I’m in a polyamorous relationship with  _ Jon  _ of all people, I don’t need Jon and Georgie to move past being QPP into actual romance. Barf city.”

“Is the actual problem here that you all think me having feelings is disgusting?” Jon wondered. He didn’t really like the term QPP, but he figured it was better than ‘life partner and coparent but, like, we’re best friends’. 

“Yes,” everyone said, simultaneously. 

“Imagine Jon holding your hand,” Sasha sighed, faux-romantically. “You both sitting on a gondola going down the Thames, you’re all cuddled up against each other...he’s like, oh, I have to tell you something...you’re like, what could it be, Jon? And he says -”

“Have you finished filing the Hawkins Statement?” Melanie said, in a faux-gravelly voice with a terrible accent, and everyone broke out into laughter. 

“I don’t sound like that,” Jon said weakly. “I bet Tim’s proposal wasn’t any better.”

“Oh, it was atrocious,” Sasha said cheerfully. “Almost as bad as a gondola down the Thames.”

“Chop chop, everybody, we have work to do,” Melanie said, still holding that ridiculously stuffy accent. “Tim, go flirt with a cop, make sure it’s not one of those lesbian ones. Melanie, use your Youtuber powers to fix my computer, I got another virus. Martin, make me tea, that’s a good lad. The job of a Head Archivist is very busy, very occupied as I hide under my desk seeing who killed -”

She stopped, abruptly and strangely. 

“Who killed who?” Sasha asked, laughing. Basira was silent too. “That awful accent coach?”

“Yeah,” Basira said, but her voice was uncharacteristically shaky and uncertain. “It’s a good thing we all left before Jon could be our boss. He’d be terrible.”

Awkward silence stretched. 

“It’s getting late, we should probably get going,” Sasha said, sounding a little nervous. 

“Yeah, Daisy’s conked out. Better call an Uber.” Basira sighed. “Wish she’d learn moderation for once.”

“If you want to save the money, you’re both more than free to crash here,” Jon said. “The couch pulls out.”

Basira hesitated. “I have a bail jumper to catch at a motel early next morning, but I really don’t want to buy a fifty quid Uber...Jon, if it’s not too much trouble, can you set Daisy up with something for the night, and she can take the train back to our place tomorrow? I don’t want to ditch her, but…”

“It’s no issue at all,” Jon said firmly. It really wasn’t - Daisy had slept off a few too many drinks at their house too often to count. “Go home and get some rest. Your bail jumper’s in room 206, he’ll be leaving at eleven fifteen am.”

“I hate and love how you do that. Hug?” 

“Sure.” Jon opened his arms as Basira stepped forward and hugged him tightly. “Get home safe.”

“I’ll be collecting my worse half and heading out too,” Sasha said warmly, and when Jon nodded she stepped forward and hugged him too. “Goodbye, Jon. I’m glad we’re living in the same city again. We worried about you.”

“There’s really no reason,” Jon said weakly. 

“Isn’t there? You’ve always been so bad at happiness. I suppose some people just weren’t made for it.” She laughed a little. “I’m one of those people too. Goodnight, Jon. Let me go grab Tim and we can head out.”

In that way, hugs were exchanged, backs were slapped, and one by one his friends filtered out the door. Jon made up the foldout bed for Daisy, which she promptly collapsed on and fell asleep, and Gerry cleaned up the beer cans as Georgie put away all the food. Jon found himself leaning against the kitchen counter, listening to Georgie scrape and stack the plates. He wasn’t helping - Georgie was very fastidious about how they arranged the leftovers in the fridge so Jon could always know where everything was located, which meant that Jon himself was not allowed to help due to his MO of shoving it in there and hoping it fit - but as she typed identifications into the braille labeller to stick on every piece of tupperware Jon found himself broaching the subject. 

“Is it weird?”

“Yeah, it’s practically from 2005. Why is all accessibility technology so dated?”

“I meant me and Martin.” Jon crossed his arms, somewhat uncomfortable. “I know Melanie ran off the second he kissed me to tell you all about it.”

“She was texting me as it happened. I really have to talk with her about privacy.” Georgie sighed. “It’s really none of my business.”

“Everybody else seems to think it’s their business, and they don’t live with me.”

“We’ll buy Gerry one of those ‘Daddy’s Got A Boyfriend’ books,” Georgie said wryly. “He’ll be fine. The others will be fine too. I know they’ve all been super weird about it -”

“Stalking and harassment weird?”

“And you’re right to be upset about that. It’s not appropriate. But you’re a little...sensitive when you feel like people are babying you, and I promise that’s not where this is coming from. It’s just weird for them to see you dating again. And they don’t want your heart broken, because nobody’s confident it’ll survive that.”

Jon didn’t think the way the others were acting had as little to do with the blindness as Georgie said it did, but she was mostly right. He just shook his head. It was incredibly uncharacteristic for her to dodge questions. “Fine. But I didn’t ask about them, I asked about you.”

“I said it was none of my -”

“The more you avoid the question the more upset I’m going to assume you are.” 

“I’m not upset!” Georgie yelled, and Jon flinched away. “Shit. Shit, sorry. Shit. I didn’t mean to yell, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Jon said, shaken and confused at his own reaction. Georgie had a hot temper, she yelled when she got mad, but why had he reacted so strongly? Why was his heart beating heavily in his chest, why was he filled with the urge to hide the glass cups? What was wrong? Normally Jon could give as good as he got. And she never even raised her voice at Gerry. “Just - Daisy’s sleeping.”

“And Gerry’s in the other room. Right.” Georgie was silent for a long moment, the clatter of tupperware and food pausing, and whatever expression was on her face, if she was tense, if she was clutching the kitchen counter with pale knuckles like she sometimes used to, he didn’t know. “Blackwood’s fine. I have nothing against you dating again. I mean, I hardly have the right. It’s just - so, what, are you going to move out with him?”

“We haven’t even gone on a date yet,” Jon said, flabbergasted. 

“I mean, you wan’t want to live with me forever,” Georgie said, speech speeding up, almost talking to herself. “You’ll, like, want to move on. The house is a problem, but we could figure it out. You have your own life to lead, I can’t just keep you on my trail forever. You’re rich and important and I’m just me, I guess. I should probably start making my own life normal. Actually, like, do monogamy.”

“Georgie, slow down!” Jon said, shocked. He moved to stand next to her, reaching out a hand until he brushed against her elbow. “I’m not going anywhere. You and Melanie have been dating for years and she still hasn’t moved in, right? I wouldn’t even care if she did. It’s a big house.”

“Me and Melanie are different, she has commitment issues. Blackwood’s, like, your soulmate or whatever, it’s so obvious. You guys got this star crossed thing going on. Interdimensional soulmates!” She shook her arm out of his grasp. “I don’t  _ do  _ jealousy, I don’t, it’s just - even I get scared sometimes. You’ve always needed me, your whole life. Especially lately. I had those few years on my own, like, Georgie’s great quest to find herself, but every experience I had all I wanted to do was share it with you. You keep saying you don’t need anybody, and maybe that’s even true, but what if I need you?”

It was an almost unprecedented display from her. Jon stayed quiet, knowing that his response would be important, listening to her furiously print braille lettering off the label maker and stick it on plastic. It was the same as Tim, as Melanie and Sasha and Daisy. Maybe everybody needed each other, because all their lives were so fragile. Held up with sellotape and a prayer. Was change good? Was it even acceptable?

But it was different, too. Georgie had been the one who used to beat back bullies, who dragged him to class every morning even while in the pits of depression. She had been getting him to go to sleep on time since before his voice cracked. And he had been doing the same for her, as much as he ever could. She always said that he grounded her. 

“Georgie,” Jon said slowly, “for all you know he could be annoying and we could break up next week. This is not a guaranteed thing. Why are you acting like it is?”

“Because it feels that way? I don’t know.” Georgie grunted with frustration. “I look at him, and I look at you, and I’m like...it feels right. This is it. I felt the same way when I saw Tim and Sasha together the first time. Like, this was it. And he just feels so familiar in a way that’s just so off putting, and I know it’s not his fault he remembers everything from the parallel universe and we don’t, but he knows all these secret Jon facts that none of us do, and you probably destroyed the world with your love or whatever -”

“I destroyed the world because of you,” Jon said suddenly, not even knowing it was true until he said it. “You and Gerry and - and Tim, I think, for some reason? Elias had threatened you, I think. He said that if I didn’t do...something, then he’d hurt you. I had no choice.”

Long, shocked silence. Finally, Georgie said, “I feel like I was just complaining about getting a papercut and you just dropped that your mother was knifed to death.”

From what Jon could tell, that was a pretty good summary of the differences between the two universes. Jon opened his arms in a silent invitation, and Georgie hugged him tightly. She was soft and warm against him, as always. 

“Change is scary. And your best friend getting a boyfriend for the first time’s scary too. It’s okay to be scared. But you and I are a forever kind of thing, Georgie.” He smiled, a little lopsided and crooked. “What was it you said, years ago?”

Georgie giggled a little. “ ‘Jon Sims, if I have to help you get dressed for the rest of my life, I will! Don’t think I won’t!’ “

“That finally motivated me to buy the color gun.”

“Now you can do that by yourself,” Georgie said.

“I can,” Jon said, “but I like getting your input anyway.”

Jon had never cheered anybody up by telling them that he destroyed the world for them, but it seemed to work. He washed the dishes and she put them away, and by the time that they were ready to crawl into bed he ended up slipping inside hers. They talked lightly, a little drunkenly, about everything and nothing, and fell asleep holding hands. One tether to another. 

Now, Jon thought, all I have to do is figure out how I destroyed and rebuilt the world. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! Thank you to everyone who followed, kudos'd, and especially everyone who left comments on each chapter! You're all fantastic, and be sure to read the end notes for a great surprise.

  
  


Jon didn’t wake up, but he did some to some semblance of alertness. 

He knew immediately he was dreamwalking. Jon was exceptionally practiced at it, enough to be able to control it somewhat and be aware he was doing it, and Elias seemed to think he had some sort of skill at it. Gertrude always said that she had never quite gotten the hang of it, anyway. It was pretty uniquely an Eye skill, and Gertrude was really his only other frame of reference there. There were many books written by Archivists in the past, which were at least entertaining due to Elias apparently _always having been like that_ , but - anyway. 

The world was dark, and Jon frowned as he groped for some semblance of narration. He felt something against his back, like he was lying down on something, and when he raised his hand he hit a solid ceiling, barely an inch above his head. He couldn’t even bend his elbow. When he opened his mouth the air was humid and earthy, and when he scratched his fingernails below him he felt only splintered wood and dirt. Jon, almost involuntarily, took in a shuddering breath, his heart leaping inside his chest. It was just a dream. He could leave anytime he wanted. But whose dream was this?

Loudly, as if it was right next to his ear, Jon heard sniffling and soft sobbing. It was quiet and desperate - the crying of somebody who knew that nobody was coming, but they couldn’t help crying anyway. It was intensely unfamiliar. 

However, something about the situation _was_ familiar, and although the waking world was as difficult to remember in dreams as dreams were in the waking world, Jon managed to remember a surprisingly vulnerable conversation. 

“Daisy,” Jon whispered, and the crying stopped. “Is that you?”

“Jon?” Daisy said. Her voice was close, very close, and Jon wriggled around in the coffin to try to reach out a hand to her. “Why are you here?”

“I’m not sure. You’re sleeping on my couch, so perhaps proximity had something to do with it.” Although, if proximity was all of it, he’d be in Georgie’s dream right now. “Is it dark in here? I can’t really tell.”

“What do you care,” Daisy said, almost sullenly. “You sold away your capability to care about anyone but yourself. I bet you’re here to watch me. Go ahead and laugh. This is my own fault. I’d kill the motherfucker again.”

Alright, so they were working off two very different sets of memories. That was fine. Jon was getting used to it. He managed to stretch out a hand, brushing his fingertips against Daisy’s forearm. He slid them down the arm until he reached her wrist, and gently wrapped her hand in his. “Let’s get out of here. Trust me, I’m very accomplished at rescuing people from nightmares.”

“What’s the point,” Daisy moaned. “Nothing’s everything, and everything is me. The Unknowing is here and everything’s something.”

The Unknowing? That ritual had happened three years ago. It was the last ritual Gertrude had blown up before she got her ‘promotion’. From what he had heard, a gratuitous amount of C4 had been involved. 

Three years ago. Three years ago Daisy had woken up to see the dead walking, Tim and Sasha had quit their jobs and everyone else had soon after, Gertrude had stopped the ritual, Jon had gotten into something that was _very_ far from an accident. The world had been...destroyed, changed, created? A ritual? But whose? 

“Hold onto me,” Jon whispered, and broke down the dream. 

He made the coffin intangible, sitting up and letting his head clip through the top like a buggy video game, or like a ghost. He pulled Daisy up with him, and slowly climbed to his feet. Daisy was still crying, and she seemed to be in too much pain to properly move, so he gently bent down and picked her up. She slung an arm around his neck, still sniffling, in a way that was so completely foreign to Daisy that it freaked him out, and Jon bent his knees before leaping upwards. 

He surfaced in what he understood to be an auditorium. They were standing in the back, rows and rows of seats in front of them, and three figures stood on stage. His muted awareness of his surroundings didn’t inform him what was sitting in the seats, or where that ghastly singing came from, but he had the feeling that he didn’t want to know. Was this the Unknowing? Where was Gertrude? 

He put Daisy down, setting her on the ground as she gritted her teeth and attempted to stand on wobbly legs, but his attention was focused on the stage. There was a tall mannequin with spindly limbs standing on it in a glistening and sequined, kind of sexy, ringmaster’s costume. It had a painted on smile that twitched and shifted. Standing across from it was another figure, almost human. It was tall, with an afro pulled into a tight ponytail, with light brown skin and a very prissy manner of dressing. In fact, it almost could have passed for a very realistic doll, if it wasn’t for the way that it didn’t quite have eyes. They were there, glass marbles set into a fleshy face, but they were black holes of emotions. They were pits, pits that sucked you in and made you fall and fall and fall. Wells of darkness, deep depths of hatred and indifference. There was nothing human about that. 

But if it wasn’t for the eyes, it could have been a statue of Jon. Jon, as a much younger man. His hair was much shorter these days, easier to take care of, and his clothing was usually just simple khakis and a rotating set of colored button-up shirts. 

And there was Tim, too. Tim, tall and proud and so angry. His face was twisted in a mask of rage, and he was the only figure on the stage not having a polite conversation. He rushed behind the female mannequin and attacked it with a hatchet, which only seemed to confuse it. 

“No, no,” Daisy was saying, “this never happened, I never saw it.”

So it wasn’t her memory. Whose was it? Was it even a memory? Maybe this was happening right now, a grotesque play acted out in an eternal finale somewhere far away. 

The statue of Jon said something, and the mannequin said something back. It picked up Tim by the throat, then released him, then exchanged more words with the statue of Jon. Then it reached out a razor sharp finger and slid it across Tim’s neck, decapitating him neatly. 

A woman screamed. Basira. But Daisy screamed too, lost in the horror of the spurting blood, and Jon decided that this was enough. His curiosity wasn’t important when Daisy looked like she was reliving a terrible memory. 

He had just reached out a hand to decompose the dream when the statue of Jon changed. The pits seemed to recede, his old dark brown eyes rising up, and everything about the figure seemed to soften and collapse. It was Jon again, and Jon realized with horror that he had been in there the whole time. 

He felt a tugging at his hand, and he angled his head down at a collapsed Daisy. She was frowning at him, even though her cheeks were stained with tears. “Your eyes are all weird. What happened to them?”

“I think,” Jon said slowly, “this.”

The other Jon fell to his knees, covered in blood. He fell forward, propped up by elbows and knees on the stage, trembling. He was sobbing. A broken man. His hair had broken free of his ponytail, the curls matted with blood dangling in his face. Somebody was shooting at him, but Jon couldn’t tell who. The mannequin didn’t move, just smiled. 

Loudly, echoing through the auditorium, he began to speak. Chant. Jon was more than familiar with the process and the words, ringing a distant center of familiarity in his brain, but he couldn’t decipher them. They sounded like a mix between Latin and hell. But interspersed between the words, between the sobbing and the chanting, he heard English. 

“Give him back,” Jon was sobbing. “Give them back, give me back, give me back, give me back, give him back, give them back, I want them, I want them, give me back.”

“He’s destroying it,” Daisy whispered, and it was true. The auditorium was decomposing without Jon’s help, falling down in shudders and cracks. The ceiling was falling down, the mannequin was screaming, and the audience members were beginning to pop out of existence. “He’s tearing down the whole show.”

“Give me them back, _give me them back, give me back -_ ”

“We have to go,” Jon said, grabbing Daisy’s hand again. “Right now. Before we get destroyed too.”

It was just a memory. Nothing was really being destroyed, reality wasn’t _really_ being rewritten. But maybe, in the moment of the destruction of the universe, there was no time. It was happening now, it had happened, it will happen. Maybe there was a world out there that was stuck in its final moments, permanently locked in this second of destruction, as a man lost somebody he once cared about. 

How amazing, Jon thought, that you could destroy something just from loving it too much. That you could love so much you were destroyed. 

Jon yanked them free of the memory as reality compressed itself into a small dot and disappeared, a reverse Big Bang, but he must have done it too quickly because he felt himself moving sideways, instead of upwards, and something within him snapped, as reality snapped. 

  
  


He found himself standing somewhere else, with antiseptic air and smoothly beeping machines and a loud murmur of voices from beyond. He understood the smell and scent of a hospital immediately. He also understood the scream of Martin immediately. 

“Shut up, Blackwood, it’s just us,” Daisy said irritably from next to him. She seemed back to normal, at least, her voice calm and clear as if she had never been crying. “Where are we.” A pause. Jon scowled as he tried to gain his usual dream understanding of the area, only to come up a total blank. It was as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but that couldn’t be right. “Ah. Jon, your unconscious body is lying in a hospital bed.”

“He’s in a coma,” Martin said tautly. “Daisy, where have you been? You’ve been missing for months, we thought you were dead. Jon, why are you - up? And two people? And what’s wrong with your eyes?”

“You’re definitely in a coma,” Daisy reported to Jon. “Your hair’s longer and you look like shit. Did you dream this? How do you know what Martin looks like?”

“I don’t,” Jon said. Something very surprising and, actually, downright impossible occurred to him. “Either our lives are all the result of a coma dream that I’m having after I got injured stopping the Unknowing or we’re in the wrong reality again. Sorry for bothering you, Martin, we’ll just be going.”

“What the fuck,” Martin said. 

“Oh, fuck this,” Daisy said. 

Then Jon grabbed her hand and jerked her again, this time properly upwards, and they broke free of the reality - dream - both - neither like popping a bubble, cresting above the waves and gasping for air. 

  
  
  
  


Jon and his lovely family were eating Saturday morning pancakes when Daisy got out of bed. She shambled into the kitchen, blanket dragging on the floor, groaning like a Universal movie monster, and Gerry kindly got another plate and set it on the table before transferring some untouched pancakes from his teetering stack on his plate to hers. Daisy ate them, so far as Jon could tell just by stuffing them in her mouth, as Georgie chatted about the weather. Gerry grunted occasional affirmations, probably scrolling through his phone or texting his friends. Did Gerry have friends? This seemed like something Jon should care about. 

“Basira texted and said that she caught the bail jumper,” Georgie added, finally saying something that made Daisy grunt in interest. “She said to come home whenever you’re ready. I have to run a few errands, and I know Gerry has an essay. What are you two planning on doing today?”

“Enjoying my Saturday,” Jon said easily, carefully cutting his pancake before cramming a piece in his mouth. “Might just sit outside and read. What about you, Daisy?”

“I’m taking your dog.”

“...do I get him back?”

“Fine.”

“Are you going to take Tiresias for a walk?” Gerry asked, perking up. “Can I come?”

“Sure, whatever.” 

“Oh, bring The Admiral too,” Georgie said, “he loves walks. He has a little kitty harness and everything.”

That was that. But Jon had the sense that Daisy was just biding her time, and sure enough when he got up, dumped his dishes in the sink, and walked back into his room to dress for the day he was startled by the sound of the door slamming open. 

“It’s Daisy,” Daisy said. So she had slammed open the door to let him know she was coming in. Polite? “How did you do that.”

Jon held up the shirt he was holding. “Choose a shirt? I have a little gun that tells me what color something is, and -”

“No, idiot, how did you get in my ni - dream.”

“How do you know it was really me?” Jon asked mysteriously, only to receive unimpressed silence. “Alright, fine. I’m sorry for invading your privacy, sometimes the dream walking thing just happens. I figured you’d rather I got you out of there then just leave you there. As for how, it’s basically impossible to understand unless you’re an Archivist or similar entity. I think Oliver Banks can do it, but when we talked about it his method was very different from mine. There’s some literature I can recommend you on the theoretical side -”

“Jon.”

“Right. Uh, no clue, won’t happen again.”

She was silent for a long minute, and Jon shrugged and went back to changing. He was relatively unselfconscious about changing in front of her, as she had been around to help him change clothes very frequently while he was in the hospital, so he went ahead and swapped his shirts. He was focusing on aligning his buttons correctly when she spoke again. “But it wasn’t a dream.”

“It may not... _only_ have been a dream,” Jon allowed. “Sometimes dreams can reveal memories, forgotten or otherwise. On certain occasions, I imagine that they can even be visions into other lives. Helen’s mentioned something along those lines, I imagine, due to her association with the Spiral.” Actually, Helen was likely the best person to talk to regarding this alternate reality business. Jury was out on if she would choose to tell him anything, though. “It’s possible that your past affiliation with the Hunt allows you a certain insight. The fact that we both saw an event which you hadn’t witnessed in your past life lends credence towards it being a window into another world rather than a memory.”

“Could have been a memory of yours.”

Jon’s fingers halted over his buttons for a second before he continued buttoning. “Nonsense. Allowing my personal forgotten memories, dreams, and traumas to impact my dream walking is amateurish, and I am far from an amateur. Transitioning from your memories to my own - it’s like you missing a five meter shot at the target range. Wouldn’t happen.”

“You’ve let your personal issues get in the way before. Your shirt’s misaligned.”

Jon cursed under his breath. He either needed to transition to magnetic buttons or finally suck it up and stop wearing button-ups. But he would rather die than do that. “We can’t dismiss the possibility of the Eye’s gracious intervention. Exerting control over my dreams - and yours, if I happen to be in them - is nothing to it, and something it does rather frequently.” 

“It’s not enough to just tell you that you’re the man who sold the world,” Daisy said. “It has to show you too.”

“It’s very fond of me,” Jon allowed. “Maybe it wants me to keep asking questions about where we came from.”

“It’s usually best to do the opposite of what it wants,” Daisy said flatly. 

Jon kept his face still, a placid mask of devotion. “Whatever the Eye asks of me, I will fulfill to my greatest capacity. That’s my role.”

“It maimed you,” Daisy said, voice cracking in anger and slowly rising. “It stole our lives. It _destroyed the world._ Now the Eye is a global superpower and you can’t fix your own shirt.”

It was a low blow, and Jon felt his hands fall from the undoubtedly messy shirt. He knew he was pushing her, refusing to admit that he was even slightly unhappy with what had happened, but some things ordinary humans could express that Avatars weren’t allowed to. Jon knew better than to bite the hand that fed him. “I think a more accurate way to put it is that the Eye, in its graciousness, resurrected our friend and saved you from that coffin. Some gratitude might be in order.”

“We couldn’t quit before, could we?” Daisy asked out loud. “But after you destroyed everything, we could. Everyone moved on from the Institute but you. Everyone was secretly safe but you. I guess you saved everyone but yourself, Jon.”

Jon flinched. 

Footsteps sounded closer, and Daisy silently took his shirt. She buttoned it up for him, aligning the holes and making it neat, and if Jon could save her from her nightmares and see her at her most vulnerable point he could let her do this for him. 

“Martin Blackwood,” Daisy said softly. “Everyone says the same thing. Tim kept on bitching about him being a creep who wouldn’t stop staring at you. That there’s something off about him.” She hesitated for a second, her fingers lingering on his shirt. “That other Blackwood, in the hospital room. He was different. Solid. His eyes looked at you, instead of through you. His cheeks had color to them. He was less like a ghost. Just more...there. What’s wrong with Blackwood, it’s hard to put your finger on. But he’s different from the Martin in that other world. Blackwood’s a real Joe Spooky.”

“Are you going to threaten him again?” Jon asked, resigned to the answer. 

But she surprised him. She always really did. “Nah. He had been sleeping by that hospital bed. I could tell. He’s a good sort.” Daisy squeezed his arm tightly once. “Besides. I don’t think I need to repeat myself from the first time.”

It was rare that she had to. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, Jon hugged her back, and she left the room while closing the door behind her. Presumably, to go steal his dog. Hopefully Jon got him back. He really was an expensive dog. 

Instead, he loaded his phone full of his most recent audiobook ( _The Rise of Cultism In The 20th Century and the Death of the Old Religions: A Study Throughout American History_ ) and sat on his rocking chair on his front porch, listening to the crickets chirp and the murmur of voices passing by on the street. He settled a blanket over his legs, keeping a bottle of water close, and delighted in throwing supernaturally accurate rocks at Instagram influencers who tried doing photoshoots outside of his house. It was incredibly common, several a day trying to pose in front of his fence, and Jon had to resist the urge to lay a curse on each and every one of them. Which he could. The last time he had ran into a woman berating a waitress at a restaurant, she had been unable to tell a lie for a month.

As a child, he did his reading alone in the dark, huddled under his covers trying to stay up past his bedtime. As an adult, he did it outside in the sun, enjoying a relaxing Saturday. He had work on Monday, doing the routine tasks of his boring job - taking statements, organizing the system, digitizing old paperwork, sacrificing to a hungry god. He would eat lunch with his friends and ride the Underground home. He would take phone calls from his old friends, listening to them talk about their day, and go home and watch Jeopardy or make dinner for the night. He’d spend time with his best friend and the teenager they took in. He was well paid and took vacations occasionally. He even maybe had a boyfriend. His life was happy. 

Did it feel wrong? Inauthentic, fake, deceitful? A facade of an existence, with nothing underneath? Well, a little, but that had started far before three years ago. Jon had always had a bad case of imposter syndrome. What was attributable to his neuroses, and what was attributable to the cold machinations of his all-seeing god? Would learning the truth make him feel better? He had thought that it would. But it was just making him feel a little bit worse. 

Knowing that it was Jon who destroyed the world...it was a unique feeling. Jon didn’t really know how to feel about it. On one hand, a little proud, since it was the privilege of the Avatar to incite the apocalypse that would bring about their god’s reign on Earth. And he did. That was what Jon did. They were living the reign on Earth right now. It wasn’t bad. Sometimes Michael brought in donuts for the office. 

On the other hand…

Don’t get him wrong, of course the Eye being master of all creation was a good thing…

But…

“Jon? The girls want to know if you’re down for pub night.”

Jon startled. He hadn’t noticed Georgie walk onto the porch. Had he dozed off? How much time had passed? He slapped his watch, listening to it cheerfully tell him that three hours had passed. His audiobook had long since shut off. “Sure,” he said, still off-balance. “Sounds great. Georgie, do you remember that 14th century text on the Eye, by Bradwardine?”

“Sure, the eschatological one?” 

“Yes. When it described the Eye’s ritual, it described it as somewhat...well, destructive, correct? But not reconstructive.”

“Damn, Jon, asking me to remember junior year of uni up in here.” Georgie sighed, scratching lightly at an itchy spot on his shoulder. “If I remember correctly, then yes. Hell on Earth, that sort of thing. Not a destruction, since I think that’s the Desolation - or the Buried? - but definitely a resculpting. Why are you asking me? Isn’t this your job?”

“Yes, of course.” Not to mention the fact that Jon’s limited omniscence extended towards every book in the Institute’s library without any effort. Jon opened his mouth, then closed it, clearing his throat. “I think I messed up.”

“You accidentally put tumeric in the meal on Thursday instead of salt, yes.” Georgie squeezed his shoulder. “If I didn’t even notice, you couldn’t have messed up that badly. And if you’re still worrying about this alternate reality business...I dunno, Jon. Mama always told me not to borrow trouble. If it’s not a problem, why make it one?”

“I suppose you’re right.” Jon stood up, orienting himself back towards the door. “Is Gerry still out with Daisy?”

“Yes, plotting away.” Georgie sighed. “Hopefully they aren’t doing anything too illegal.”

“Isn’t it your job to stop this kind of thing?”

“If we get married I have religious immunity.” She paused a beat. “Isn’t it so fucked up that Jude Perry can legally kill people if she submits paperwork saying that it was a sacrifice to the Desolation?”

“What’s fucked up about that?” Jon asked. “We eat cows. Gods eat us. You can’t assign human values of good or evil to nature.”

“Yeah, obviously, but she’s, like, gaming the system.”

“She _is_ a banker.”

“True.”

Eventually Daisy and Gerry did come back, both acting a little sketchy, but Jon had decided a long time ago that whatever shenanigans Gerry got up to was far from his business. If that made him a permissive parent, well, whatever. Tiresias and The Admiral were tucked out but very happy from their walk, and they all waved goodbye to Daisy as she went home. 

Then Jon watched television, helped Georgie and Gerry clean the house, made sure Gerry did his homework, and put dinner for the night in the Instant Pot before he shrugged on his coat, helped Georgie pick out what was undoubtedly an extremely slinky dress, and stepped out the door leading outside on the second floor that had not been there yesterday into a different space so they could get drinks with the personifications of gods’ power on Earth. 

Drinks were a regular thing with the others, or as regular as anything could get when trying to herd together a group of adults with very different schedules. Jon never had any himself - he just didn’t really like the taste of alcohol - so by the end of the day he was usually the one dragging everyone home and making sure they got into bed alright. 

Well, him and Agnes. She didn’t really drink either, which usually made her the best conversationalist by the end of the night if she wasn’t too occupied babysitting her pissed girlfriend. Georgie had been inconsolable when those two went monogamous. 

However, the location changed each time, which wasn’t very convenient for Jon. He kept his arm looped around Georgie’s as they slowly walked into the new room, tasting the sudden blast of air conditioner and noting the silence beyond the low murmur of familiar voices. He squeezed Georgie’s hand in a silent question.

“It’s a nice restaurant,” Georgie said quietly. “Really big, lots of linen tablecloths spread over small tables. In the center there’s a few tables pushed together, where everyone’s sitting. I think we’re the last ones again. There’s no other patrons, but there is waitstaff. They look a little terrified, but that just means that they met Anabelle. One’s coming up now.” Much more loudly, and far more politely, Georgie said, “We have a party reserved. The Eye and plus one. Do you have a braille menu?”

“I - I don’t believe so, but we can read the menu out -”

“Ugh, never mind.” Normally they called ahead and asked, but when their transportation was a door with a shortcut through a pocket dimension some sacrifices were made for efficiency. For all Jon knew they could be in America right now, although the accent of the waiter did sound a little more German. “Straight ahead, Jon. Girls! Open up a chair! And you fuckers didn’t pick an accessible restaurant again!”

“Nobody has fucking braille menus, deal with it!” Jude yelled. But Jon heard the sound of screeching anyway, and the seating was rearranged a bit so Georgie could pull out a chair for him, and Jon could grab the back and gingerly sit on it. Georgie sat next to him, already squealing and exchanging hugs with the other highest spiritual authorities in the country. “Georgie, you bitch, it’s been three weeks. How are you?”

“Doing just fine. How’s work going? Boil any heads lately?”

“I had to stop her from burning down the New York Stock Exchange,” Agnes said, as monotone as ever. “Hello, Georgie. Hello, Jon. It’s good seeing you two.”

“Good afternoon, all,” Jon sighed. He liked Georgie’s friends, but they were a lot. “Who’s here?”

“Anabelle’s here,” Anabelle said cheerily. She sounded like she had already hit the drinks. “D’ya like the digs, Sims? It’s so fancy. I figured, hey! We’re classy gals! We shouldn’t always be huddling in pubs! We’re adults, with jobs, and we should rent out a five star restaurant for the night and drink all their wine if we want.”

“It was so easy,” Helen sighed. “Oh, Jon, I’m here too. I just pretended that we’re having a business meeting about what local business was going to get fed to the Spiral and they let us have the whole thing. Our lives are so good.”

“Trev and I keep getting invitations in the mail,” Julia grunted, ice cubes clinking. “For all the schmoozing bullshit. Stupid. I’m not going to sacrifice your political rival to the hunt, Ted Cruz. Fuck that guy. I don’t _care_ if he’s the Zodiac Killer and was, like, a big name in the eighties or whatever. Boring old men.”

“Wasn’t the Zodiac Killer sixties?” Jude asked, and everybody awkwardly remembered that Jude was born in the fifties, even if she didn’t look like it. She was ancient. 

“Does anybody want to see the beetle I found outside?” Jane asked. “Jon, look at my beetle.”

“It’s a very nice beetle,” Jon said politely. “Very...colorful.”

“Five cheers for, one night every few weeks, freeing ourselves of boring men!” Anabelle cried. “Sorry, Jon!”

“Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

The table clapped and clinked water glasses, Jon settled into his chair, and prepared himself for a long night of drinking and festivities. 

How had Georgie become friends with all these women? Through Jon, right? It only made sense. Elias had been grooming him for the position of Head Archivist for a long time, even if Jon hadn’t necessarily realized that was what he was doing. He had always been dragging Jon to those galas and get-togethers and fundraisers. He must have brought Georgie along on one of them, and she exchanged numbers with Jude, and the rest was history. She was the only non-Avatar at the table, but everybody liked Georgie. It was just something about her. That had to be it. It was the only thing that made sense. 

But Jon understood, better than most, that not everything made sense. The simplest answer wasn’t always the right one. And that memories lied. 

Was it a lie, if it had happened in this reality? Had Jon’s life before he was thirty really happened, or was it a dream concocted to lend credence towards a world constructed from the desperate wish of a grieving man? Just because it was a dream, did that mean it was not real? 

Was this a test? Was Jon supposed to wake up? Or was there no waking from this? It was far from an unpleasant prison. But what makes Heaven different from a prison, if you cannot escape it?

“Do you guys want to hear about the kinkiest guy I fucked last night?” Anabelle asked. “He wanted me to use _all_ of my arms. _Every one_.”

“You have to tear the head off a squirrel to get all your arms to pop out,” Georgie said nostalgically. “The cleanup of the blood is such a hassle.”

“But _so_ worth it.”

“They’re making eyes at each other,” Agnes whispered in his ear, and it was only then that Jon realized that she was sitting right next to him. “Not literally. But figuratively.”

“Thanks for the clarification,” Jon whispered back. 

“The beetle was black, by the way.”

“Duly noted.”

It was definitely different from the rambunctious pub night, but not as much as one might think. The conversation still turned lewd quickly, without changing the topic when the stuffy sounding maitre’d came by and took their wine orders. He asked Georgie for Jon’s order, which Jon put up with but made Georgie get snippy. They managed to get a lemonade out of him, and some roast quail with asparagus. 

At least the building was empty save for them. No dealing with strangers walking up to him and calling him an inspiration. Very brave of him to be existing in public. Personally, Jon found himself an inspiration for putting up with Jude, Anabelle, and Georgie swapping technique tips as they drank increasing quantities of thousand dollar bottles of wine. It wasn’t as if he was the one paying, though, so Jon decided to just sit back and enjoy the conversation. 

He only really started paying attention again when he heard his name, and Georgie touching his arm startled him out of the way his attention drifted. Helen was speaking, apparently detailing the latest house she had sold to a yuppie couple who wanted infinite bedrooms for free - “which is so irrational. Infinite bedrooms cost thousands extra. But enough about the trials of real estate. How’s work, Jon?”

“Still working for the biggest douche in the UK?” Jude sneered. 

“Elias left three years ago, which is why you’ve been mercifully free of his presence,” Jon reminded her. 

“Gertrude’s still there.” Jude huffed a short laugh. “She still won’t fuck you, Georgie?”

“It’s more like I won’t fuck her,” Georgie said primly. “I haven’t asked.”

“Can’t believe you’re scared of that old corpse.” Jude snorted. “Not the Georgie I know.”

“Work’s been fine,” Jon said loudly. “We got a new employee in. Martin Blackwood. He’s a...previous associate of the Lonely, I believe.”

“Is he,” Jude said, casual as anything, and Jon knew that she knew. “Peter’s a right old cunt. Glad he’s out of that.”

“Good for him,” Julia said gruffly. 

“Why is everyone making those faces?” Jane asked, as pleasantly out of it as ever. “Do we know a Martin Blackwood? I think he sounds nice. The Loneliest love my worms.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Agnes said. “Beyond what Georgie mentioned on the groupchat.”

Then everyone hushed her, and Jon could only imagine the faces that they were making, and he abruptly lost his temper. 

He slammed both his hands on the table, in as much a bid for attention as it was meant to express anger. “What do you all know about the alternate reality that I destroyed in the Watcher’s Crown ritual?”

Dead silence stretched across the table. Georgie groaned. 

“I mean,” Anabelle said, “that kind of sums it up.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Jude said, unimpressed. “When we all realized that you were the only one who didn’t remember it, we knew it was for a good reason. We all decided as a group not to tell you.”

“Elias,” Jon ground out. 

“It was my idea,” Julia said abruptly. “When I heard that you and Gerry - anyway. I didn’t want you after me. I figured bygones are bygones. I didn’t need the Hunt’s powers. It was a small sacrifice so we wouldn’t live in a world where wild bears are eating us all the time or whatever. ”

“Besides, we were worried that if you knew you’d get all annoying again,” Jude said frankly. “All evil eyed and cheerful. You’re the _worst_ when you’re cheerful. I like you best all crippled and nonthreatening.”

“Thanks,” Jon said flatly. 

“Besides, you’re our friend,” Anabelle said supportively. “Would you tell _your_ friends something that would upset them, or that they could use against you? It’s just a little bit of manipulation to make you happier. That’s the nicest sort.”

“I don’t know anything we’re talking about,” Jane said cheerfully.

“Jane and I don’t remember,” Agnes said serenely. “So it’s not just you, Jon. You just seem to be the most involved. I know that something happened to me, but I’m alright now. That’s the important thing. Where you are now is always the most important place.”

“I...I suppose,” Jon said, somewhat taken back. The Avatars were his...friends, but he knew better than to think of them as harmless. Friendly didn’t mean that they wouldn’t stab him in the back. Everyone had their own god to feed. But he hadn’t figured their motives to be both so selfish and so selfless at the same time. “I know that in order to complete the ritual, the Archivist must be marked by each power. So does that mean that you all…?”

“Long story, but in a way,” Jude said shortly. “You got all annoying afterwards. Not, like, your normal annoying. Like, Nikola annoying.”

“Who’s Nikola?” Georgie asked. “Okay, now you all look uncomfortable.”

“Someone who’s…” Anabelle paused delicately. “No longer with us.”

Now Georgie just seemed even more confused. “You guys can die?”

“If it’s proper,” Helen said quietly. 

“We think Jon killed her,” Jude said bluntly. “But it’s hard to tell. Everyone who was there is now either amnesiac or dead, so…” She sighed nostalgically. “I miss her. Crazy motherfucker, but she was a fun time.”

Jon - Jon murdered someone?

Jon?

“It’s possible,” Julia said slowly, “that when we all lost our powers, Nikola just...deanimated. Jon, Jane, Agnes, Nikola was like an animated doll. She had never truly been alive.”

“Define alive,” Jane said, throwing down the gauntlet in a very familiar argument, but Julia made a dismissive noise and kept talking. 

“So it’s possible that, when the Eye ‘won’ and cut off our connections, Nikola’s strings were snipped.” Maybe she saw the expression on his face, because she quietly said, “Rule of law, Archivist. Any...loss in service to our gods are just. You know that. You won and she lost. It’s as simple as that.”

It was a good and right thing to die in service, or to kill in service, of your god. Jon knew this. He did. Then...why did he feel bad?

Why did everyone get to live but her?

“Wait,” Jon said, “you said she was a doll. A mannequin?”

“Yep. Big smile, sequined suit, the works. Dressed like a ringmaster.” Julia hummed. “Really into skin, that one. I respect it.”

The Unknowing. She was the one who killed Tim. 

Jon exhaled slowly, and slowly drank his lemonade. “Any death in service to our god is good and just.”

“Hear hear!” Jude called. “Toast to that!”

Then they all silently agreed not to talk any more of things that once were and had never been, and they all got much drunker. Everyone save Jon, who was beginning to think that he didn’t want to know why he didn’t drink. 

Everyone, that is, save Jon and Agnes. Three hours later, the girls were giggling and there were uncomfortable sounds of making out. Their food had come eventually, quickly polished off as Georgie quietly mapped Jon’s plate for him and helped him with the condiments and sauces. Agnes was softly supporting Jude, who had fallen out of her chair when she mixed and matched a few too many drugs, and Helen was carving patterns into the expensive table with awful screeches of metal against wood. Anabelle was convincing one of the waiters that his girlfriend was cheating on him, Julia was stabbing the worms Jane kept on pulling out of her pockets, and Jon’s head was beginning to hurt again. 

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Agnes said, suddenly next to Jon’s ear. He jumped, startled. Hadn’t she been across the room? He probably just didn’t track her movement. “My beautiful girlfriend is on the floor sleeping, so we have some time.”

“Sure,” Jon said, heart jackrabbiting. He couldn’t hear Georgie’s voice, which meant that she was probably carefully watching him out of the corner of her eye. She never really strayed far from his side in public, and he knew that as much as she loved her friends she didn’t trust them an inch. Helen was too nice to, say, make Jon dizzy and force him to run into every chair on the way to the bathroom, but sometimes Jude could goad her into rearranging all the furniture in his house. Jude...liked Jon. Maybe. She just had a weird way of showing it. Probably. “What about?”

“Destiny.”

Ah. The usual, then. “What’s bothering you?” Something occurred to him. “If you would like to give a Statement over it, that would be easily done. I understand some people find it, er, relaxing.”

“Not here.” A chair scraped next to Jon, and he felt a small, overly warm hand on his arm. It pulled him gently upwards, yet with surprising strength, and Jon rose along with it. The chair on the other side of Jon skittered upwards too, and Jon abruptly wished that he had brought Tiresias after all. He didn’t like to bring animals around Jude Perry, but a guide he could trust sounded very appealing right now. “We’ll go outside.”

“I’ll come with you,” Georgie said, tone careful and polite. “I could use some air, anyway.”

“No. Just us. We need privacy. Helen?” 

“What?” Helen said, hiccuping slightly. “Oh. You kids have fun.”

“Wait -” Georgie yelled, as Agnes said something disapproving about how she was older than Helen, as something warped and shifted and leaped in Jon’s perception, and he no longer knew where he was. 

Jon was scared of a great deal of things in his life. He was scared of the Beholding, as was proper, and of Gertrude, which was just rational. He was scared of spiders and he was scared of dying alone and forgotten. He was scared of TBIs and he was scared of losing his job, although that fear was quite irrational. He was scared of anything happening to his friends, of Georgie deciding that he was too much work and leaving him alone, of Gerry’s Mum winning custody over him. Most of them were irrational, but that didn’t stop him from feeling them. However, in what was in Jon’s opinion was a _very rational_ fear, he was petrified of getting lost. If it wasn’t for the Beholding’s stain all over him, the Spiral would have been exploiting him to death by now. At this point, Jon honestly didn’t know whether he was more scared of the Spiral or the Web, although it was quite a relief that both their Avatars were very lovely if slightly awful people. 

So, when Jon felt the ground shift under him and had the dizzying sense that he had moved while standing still, the only thing that kept him from panicking was knowing that fear was a foolish thing to show in front of an adherent of the Lightless Flame. He took a deep breath, tasting the air - a little stale, maybe they were inside? - and listened hard for background noise. If they were in London and anywhere close to a street, the sound of cars would be present. He couldn’t hear anything. With his free arm he dug into his pocket and pulled out his phone, quickly navigating it to the gps. He selected his location with a verbal command, only to receive an ear splitting screech and his phone’s automated voice dying off in a strangled scream. When Jon defaulted to his last resort and asked the Beholding for information about where he was, he got interference static, as if the line was busy. 

Great. Dollars to donuts he was in some endless hallway or another. Jon stuffed his phone back inside his pocket, scowling. 

“This isn’t funny.”

“I am the messiah of the Cult of the Lightless Flame, chosen prepartum to usher in the Scoured Earth,” Agnes intoned, and Jon sighed as he realized that he was not going home until this conversation was finished. Knowing Agnes, she hadn’t intended to be malicious about it. Hopefully she would remember to bring him back. She could genuinely get a little scatter-brained. “I am the agent of the Desolation’s ritual, trained since birth for this role. It was my duty and destiny to usher in the apocalypse and the reign of fire upon this land.”

“Good for you,” Jon said, unimpressed. Her and like, about fourteen people once every ten years. The Entities just didn’t give up. “What does this have to do with me?”

“I didn’t _want_ to,” Agnes said, as monotone and calm as ever, but with an odd undercurrent of tension in her voice. Jon now understood the need for privacy. It wasn’t proper to say such things where your patrons could hear you. And they could always hear you. “I liked the world. I didn’t choose any of this - not how I was born, not my childhood, not how I burned everything I touched. I didn’t want to destroy my coffee shop or the animal shelter or the library. I wanted a life. A life I could never have. I did not crave destruction and flame. I craved stability. I wanted to wake up every day and have faith that the world would be there tomorrow.” She paused for a second. “Jude thought I was crazy. She was always a...true believer. Everything bored her. She only felt when she saw something burn. She liked me because no matter how many times she burned me, I still stayed. I wasn’t something that could be destroyed. Until I was, I suppose. I don’t remember it. I have...two conflicting sets of memories. I don’t always remember them both.” Another pause. Jon wondered if there was an expression on her face - regret? Fear? Sadness? “I woke up one day, three years ago. In bed next to Jude. A normal day, and yet...not. Jude turned to me, like she was surprised to see me. She started crying and kissing me. Jude doesn’t cry. She told me I was right. That she saw too late that I had always been right. And that she had done something treasonous for me. I didn’t understand. I was on the phone with my mother when Georgie texted us that you were in the hospital. I had always liked you. I was sad. But Jude was so happy. ‘He did it’, she kept saying. ‘The son of a bitch did it’. The Lightless Flame’s apocalypse was far away. We would have the world, in its coffeeshops and libraries and homes, for a few more centuries at least. Jude doesn’t seem so bored anymore.”

Another piece of the puzzle. Another perspective slotted into the whole. Jon wondered how many perspectives it would take for him to truly understand what had happened, in the world that never was, and had never been. 

“So it wasn’t just me,” Jon muttered. “We had all...agreed on this new world. Jude and the others must have helped me perform the ritual. That’s why they didn’t tell me. The less people who remember that they betrayed their patrons the better.”

“I don’t care,” Agnes said flatly. “I doubt you were thinking of me at all, when you remade the world. I know nobody really wanted me back except Jude. I was born to die. But I want something from you, Archivist. My destiny’s been put on hold. My life is calm and happy. I no longer hurt everything I touch. But this _isn’t what I want._ ” She leaned closer, and Jon felt lithe warm fingers on his arm again. They were heating up, from warm to hot, and even as Jon tried to tug out of her grasp he failed. “I don’t want to be an Avatar at all. I want to have only heard of the Cult of the Lightless Flame in classrooms. I want to practice my religion on Sundays by lighting a candle and saying meaningless words. I want - I want to be an _atheist._ I want to live without burning. Give me this. I know you can. You’re the most powerful man in the world.”

“I - I think you misunderstand the situation,” Jon said tightly, and tried a little bit more obviously to tug himself away from her. Her grip was beginning to turn painful. “I don’t remember what I did. I can’t do it again. And - and I can’t ask the Eye to remake the world because you want us to. That’s just not how it works.”

“You can’t take away my power,” Agnes whispered, and Jon heard the crackle of flames underneath her smooth, young tones. “I _am_ the burning. It destroys me from the inside. Please, Jon. I want to be free of this fear. I want to be human.”

“You can’t be human and free of fear.”

“Then _kill me_ .” Agnes’ voice was hypnotic, like the innermost dancing flame of a candle, and Jon bit off a scream as his brain whited out with pain from her hand. “Everybody else got a happy ending but you and me. We’re both still trapped within gods we never wished to worship. Everybody else got the freedom to choose but _us._ Why?”

“Because we didn’t deserve it!” Jon screamed, and it was as if she had reversed his own compulsion onto himself. The truth came tearing out of him, like a fishhook thrown into a throat and pulling up gristly and squirming organs. “You didn’t get a happy ending because you didn’t deserve it! Gertrude and I are the same, she’s Head of the Institute as a _punishment_ and - and I sold my soul to the Eye and that doesn’t just go away. If I could fix his problem, don’t you think I would? If I could save you I’d save myself too!”

“Don’t punish me because you want to punish _yourself_ ,” Agnes said, but if she said anything else then Jon couldn’t hear it, because he blacked out from the pain. 

  
  
  


Quite possibly the least pleasant thing to wake up to in the hospital was the sound of Elias Bouchard’s voice. So, naturally, the first thing Jon heard when he woke up in the hospital for the first time since an imaginary car accident three years ago was the voice of his ex-boss. 

He was talking about taxes. Or, more accurately, avoiding filing taxes with offshore bank accounts. Jon had the strong urge to go back to sleep. 

“Are you finally awake? Good. Don’t go back to sleep, this hospital is dull and too loud.” Jon groaned, already regretting not taking the opportunity to return to dreamless sleep. “You’ve been waking up and falling asleep for days now. I knew you would take up for good at this time, so I told Miss Barker to go home and get some rest.”

“It’s a miracle,” Jon croaked, forcing his eyes open. “I can see again. I’m cured. The colors and lights are so blinding. My god...Elias. You’ve grown even more wrinkly over these years. You’re so ugly now. I forgot you were this ugly. Peter is going to dump you for a sexier trophy husband, I can See it in your future.”

“If you’re physically capable of stopping being annoying, please do so.” Elias sighed, as if Jon was a particularly disobedient child he spent millions in legal fees on in order to avoid having custody of for more than two days a year. “I’ve been running damage control for days. An Avatar of the Desolation attempting to murder an Avatar of the Beholding is a serious political faux pas. The other Entities have been smart enough to avoid antagonizing us for three years now. I’m going to make Perry and Montague regret this.” 

“Aw, you do care,” Jon joked weakly. Of course, Elias’ offense was professional and political, not personal, and they both knew that. But his hospital pillow was soft and not scratchy, and he didn’t hear anybody else in the room. A private room in a nice hospital. Undoubtedly Elias’ handiwork. Maybe that was enough care. “It wasn’t on purpose. I think she just got...upset, and forgot her own strength. Don’t be too hard on her.”

“Agnes Montague does not get upset. What really happened, Jon?”

“You can’t compel me,” Jon said weakly. His arm didn’t hurt, but he suspected that he was on a grotesque amount of painkillers. “I’m the strongest out of all of us. Not in any...useful way, but I am.”

“It is in the best interest of our master if you tell me the truth. I didn’t come here from Greece for you to give me the runaround, Jonathan.”

Whatever. Jon didn’t feel bad for cutting Elias’ three year vacation short. “Your master, not mine.”

Stunned silence. Finally, Elias said, “You’re high on painkillers. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’d advise you not to say it again.”

Jon groaned, attempting to push himself upright in bed. No nurses had come to check in on him now that he was awake, and he knew from experience that was strange. Or maybe, with Elias here, not so strange. “I didn’t know what this job entailed when I accepted it. You used me, tricked me, and manipulated me. I didn’t _want_ this. And don’t give me that bullshit about choices again. My choice to become an information freak is not equivalent towards giving my _consent_ to make me a monster.”

A long, taut silence. Evenly, as if they were discussing the weather, Elias said, “You remember.”

“I don’t,” Jon said, frustrated beyond all imagination. “I just _know._ I was tricked into this, I was coerced into selling my soul, and now I can’t leave. It’s not fair. It wasn’t fair for Agnes, and it’s not fair for me. And it’s because of _you_.”

Another short silence. “If you want to take your revenge, Jonathan,” Elias said mildly, “I cannot stop you.”

Went unsaid was the fact that Jon was severely burned on one arm, extremely unathletic, and blind. They both knew that it wasn’t that kind of revenge. Jon’s connection to the Beholding was far more powerful than Elias’, his powers greater, and if Jon wanted to pinch the connection that gave Elias eternal life closed and let him waste away then he could. 

But that would be murder. A murder of someone who, against all odds, was a friend. And Jon wasn’t much in the business of that. 

“You haven’t displeased the Eye,” Jon said sullenly, instead of ‘I don’t want to kill you’. They both knew what he meant. “Tell me what you remember of that day three years ago.”

“Honestly, Jon, you should be getting some rest -”

“ _What happened the day after the apocalypse, Jonah?”_

He hadn’t used the compulsion in - months, at least, maybe longer. He didn’t really like using it. It made him feel just a little unclean. But it was completely irresistible, even to Jonah Magnus, and Elias smoothly launched into the narrative with no audible hesitation or pain. Jon knew, just from experience, that his eyes would be the slightest bit glazed and unfocused, as he lost himself in the memory. 

“I was well aware of your plans, of course. Or most of them. At that point, all of my own plans were going down the drain, and I was forced to reply on your legendarily half-baked and sloppy machinations. Your soul had been sold for a month at that point, and I was growing tired of being forced to bow to your empty shell that you had stuffed the Beholding inside. It was perverted and disgusting. It kept insisting that it was mostly Jon, with some Beholding in there, but I knew the truth. My master was wise, fearsome, and ruthless. That thing in your body was...annoying, petty, and childish. It wasn’t you or the Beholding, but some strange chimera that made an entirely new monster

. I hated it. I hated _you_ , for leaving me alone with it. But I was fully aware that the situation was my fault, and the chimeric monster would bring about the apocalypse far more effectively than you ever could, so I had decided that I would roll with the punches. I would get what I wanted, in the end.”

Elias stopped only long enough to take a breath before beginning again. Jon felt sick. This was why he hated using the compulsion. He never found out what he wanted to know. 

“What I hadn’t taken into account was Martin Blackwood. I can’t imagine why he thought it was appropriate to burn my sacrifices and throw me in jail the night of the Unknowing, but I suppose he was under the impression that you would swoop in at the last minute and save the day. He always had...faith in you. Even though you failed him at every turn. I suppose when you began the ritual, it was the last time you had failed him. I was the only one who felt it happen. I felt the world...tremble. And shake. I couldn’t See what was happening, no matter how hard I tried. As I sat in my jail cell, feeling blinded and powerless, I felt reality jostle loose. I knew that this was it. Everything would be remade, it would be hell on Earth, and I would have finally won. For a second there, I was even happy.”

A rueful chuckle. Jon wasn’t feeling any better about this. 

“Then I woke up. In bed, next to a snoring Peter. We weren’t together at the time, so I suppose that was the first thing that tipped me off. I couldn’t feel his mind. That was the second thing. I jumped up, ran to the window, pulled the curtain back, and saw...the street outside my penthouse. London. Same as ever. No giant eye in the sky. No wails of anguish and terror. It looked an awful lot as if the Archivist had failed. But if it had failed, then I knew that we’d be experiencing the Unknowing. That obviously wasn’t happening either. What was going on?

“I woke Peter up. He was just as confused as me. Also fairly pissed at me, I think. He had been hearing rumors that some of the other Avatars had allied with you, but Peter is an absolutely atrocious information gatherer, so that was all he knew. The chimera had shut me _very_ firmly out of the loop. I couldn’t feel my connection to the Institute, or any of my employees, or you. Everything felt...strange. Still, almost. I didn’t know what to do, for the first time in almost a century. So, as Peter made calls to every other Avatar we had connections with, I went to work.

“Gertrude was waiting for me in my office, almost giving me a heart attack. You can only imagine how unhappy she was. She gave me the worst tongue lashing of my life for being so stupid that I ressurected her from the dead, dumped ten history books on my desk, and told me that my idiot Archivist had rewritten the world. It was only once I leafed through them that my memories of the other world began coming back to me. Or were introduced to me.

“I remembered it all, every fictional event created to fill in the cracks. I knew it was all a falsehood, as well as Gertrude and every other Avatar alive at the time did.

“When I went down to the Archives under some pathetic pretense, you were all there. Happy, smiling, making fun of me. Whole. Stoker and King handed me their resignations practically the second they saw me. They didn’t know why. I didn’t know why Martin was the only one gone, but I wasn’t complaining. My hypothesis at the time was that through burning the sacrifices, that had acted as a sort of resignation letter from the Eye. So when everything reset, he wound up somewhere else. He wasn’t attached the same way we all were.

“Peter called me later, told me that the Web had confessed its plan, and that Agnes Montague and Jane Prentiss were alive, but asleep. You were the only Avatar who didn’t remember anything.

“You were...I remember you didn’t seem quite there. Your eyes were human, but there was no presence there. You said something to me.

“‘Jonah’, you said. ‘You’ve worked here for very long, haven’t you? Wouldn’t you like a break?’.

“I said...I said no, I liked my job. You laughed. Peter texted me, and told me that nobody could find Nikola. I grew...afraid. Georgie called me the next morning, saying that you had gotten into a car accident. I said, ‘He doesn’t drive’. But Georgie was crying too hard to pay attention to that.

“The next time I saw you, you were in the hospital. And I knew what had happened. Your punishment. Gertrude’s punishment. My punishment. I just didn’t know why. I never found out.

“Even today, I hate how I don’t know why. I was a loyal servant. I _am_ a loyal servant. Why did it punish me like this? What did I do wrong? But nothing makes sense to me anymore. I’m no longer omniscient. It...aches, at night. I feel as blind as you are. But I can’t really complain. My life’s perfect, after all.”

The spell snapped, like cutting a taut string. Elias exhaled heavily, taking several deep breaths. Jon felt very small, and also much too big. 

“The one thing I don’t understand, Archivist,” Elias said evenly, “is if our master is punishing me, or you.”

“I need to talk to it,” Jon whispered. “I need to make sense of this.”

“Be aware of the risks,” Elias said sharply. “What if you remember everything and you lose your soul again? I am _not_ putting up with that thing for one more second, so help me. You weren’t yourself by the end of it. You weren’t even sane. Is that what you want again?”

Jon wanted to know why. If anybody would understand, it would be Elias. Or maybe he wouldn’t - maybe Elias was incapable of understanding something as simple as betrayal. 

“You seem convinced I’m on my way to remembering,” Jon said finally. 

“In the original timeline, only Miss Barker’s intervention stopped Jude Perry from marking you with a burn,” Elias said evenly. “Fourteen of those marks, and we’re fast tracked to another apocalypse. If that’s what you want, Archivist, I cannot stop you. You’re already part of the way there. Your insatiable curiosity and drive for the truth has destroyed the world once. It can do it again, if you want it to.”

Jon was silent. He thought about why Martin was the only assistant who didn’t stay. And he thought about punishment. 

Finally, he said, “We will not pursue retribution against Agnes. Jude will pay for my hospital bill. The nature of my injury will not be leaked to the general public. We’re already the most powerful faction. We have no need for further power plays.”

“Jonathan, I urge you to reconsider -”

“You are lucky I am not in the business of revenge, Jonah,” Jon said quietly, and Elias shut up. “Tell Georgie I’m awake and leave. I’ll send for you when I need you again. ”

Even if it went unsaid, even if Elias delighted in throwing money and power around and Jon let him, they both knew who the favored Avatar was. And they both knew who retained his power. An Avatar’s power was a symbol of their connection with their Entity, and when Jon had robbed everyone but himself of their power he hadn’t understood the effects it would have in freeing their minds of their Entity’s influence. In that particular power struggle between Jon and Elias, the way that they forever sought to manipulate and control each other, the ultimate victor was always the one with the power. And Jon, for now and for the rest of both of their extended lifespans, would always have that power. Even if neither of them liked to admit it. 

Punishment. A situation that neither of them were happy with. But a convenient one. 

“If that’s what you wish,” Elias said finally. A chair scraped near his bed, and Jon heard the rustling of the gathering of a briefcase and a coat. “I’ll be in London for a while smoothing over this mess, then. Hopefully I will survive Gertrude.”

“If I was the designer of Hell, I would make you two next door neighbors,” Jon said wryly, not expecting the joke to land. People often acted confused when he referred to ancient pagan principles. Jon had always studied Christianity as a hobby. He found it fascinating. 

“I thought that was what you did,” Elias said, as if he was telling a joke. “Goodbye, my archivist. All hail the Eye.”

“All hail the Eye,” Jon said, abruptly woozy. The compulsion had taken a bit out of him, and the painkillers seemed to be kicking in again. “Goodbye, my beating heart.”

If Elias had any response to that, Jon didn’t hear it, asleep again. 

He dreamed that two warm hands were cradling his face. Lovingly, gently, like Georgie did sometimes. But the hands were larger than Georgie’s, male and calloused, lithe and limber. They tangled into the roots of his curls, weaving themselves into him. He was pressed up against a warm body in a loving embrace, a heartbeat against his, a firm chest pressed against his. A man, about his height. Jon knew that he loved this man very much, and he melted into the embrace. 

He reached up his own hands, holding the man’s face too. His face was long and narrow, pockmarked by rough circular scars. When Jon ran his fingers through his hair, they were tight and curly, longer than Jon liked his own hair. There was just the faintest hint of five o’ clock shadow against his chin. Jon gently brushed his eyes over the man’s eyelids, only to met empty air where he should feel the soft give of eyes. Panicked, abruptly frightened, he pushed his thumbs in deeper, until they should be digging into the mans’ eye sockets. But there was nothing there, just empty pits where eyes should be, and Jon realized that he had loved a monster. 

WE HAVE TO TALK, the Eye said, and Jon screamed. 

  
  
  
  
  


“ - how should I know, I wasn’t there! I guess it was cool?”

“It was pretty cool.”

“Wow, Daisy, that’s the first time you’ve ever said I was cool. Didn’t know it was possible to reach this peak of your approval.”

“Okay, whatever, Tim threw a hatchet at a clown, whatever, can we _please_ go back to me smashing in Elias’ head with a cricket bat?”

“Georgie, I’ve told you about that three times.”

“Yes, but with more detail this time. As if I was _there_.”

“You can ask the Eye for it.”

“I could, but then it would probably take away the memory of a hug from my mother or something. No thanks. I can live vicariously through Blackwood.”

“ _Please_ call me - Jon!”

“Then we’d have three Jons, and that’s just confusing.”

“No, Jon’s awake!”

Caught. Martin always knew. Jon groaned, cracking his eyes open before remembering that it wasn’t going to help. He still forgot sometimes. It occured to Jon that, if this entire world really was an elaborate fiction designed to keep him happily dreaming, then visually it didn’t really exist at all. It was nothing but scattered sounds, a few sensations. An infinite void, peppered with soothing voices and familiar smells to keep him complacent. He had helped _create_ this, but he had never seen it. How was that fair? 

He felt a small hand in his, and he immediately felt stupid. Of course Georgie was real. Even if she didn’t remember, if she never could, that didn’t make her untrue. Her worry for him, her love and care, was the realest thing he had. He was so fucking pretentious, so full of himself. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon said, squeezing her hand. “I haven’t been very fair to you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Georgie said hotly. Wait, bad choice of words. “It’s my fault. I never should have - anyway. You’ve been out for a few days. Your arm’s doing fine, they got you a skin graft and everything. It should heal in a few weeks. Tim and Blackwood are here. They’ve been fighting nonstop. Do you need some water? A nurse?”

“Water,” Jon said, and Georgie released his hand so she could press a cup of water into it. With Jon’s other hand he reached out and found it, testing the top to make sure that it had a lid and a straw. Good. He gently guided it to his face, forcing the straw in his mouth and taking a long sip. That was much better. He popped the straw out of his mouth. “Elias?”

“He was here, then he left. Said he had business. Do you want to talk to him?”

“No. Yes.” Jon sighed. “Text him and tell him that he needs to have a communication ritual ready by the time I get out of here. Get Michael on it, he’s the best with them. We’ll probably have to find a sacrifice, so put Elias on that. He’s best at finding people.”

“Jon, buddy, brother,” Tim said, voice oddly soothing where he was normally so confrontational. “Let’s not worry about this, alright? You don’t want to do a communication ritual. That’s - wow. You’re upset and in pain. Let’s get you some more painkillers, and when you get back to work maybe we can do some light scrying -”

“Fuck,” Daisy said. 

“What’s a communication ritual?” Martin asked. 

“It’s a miracle you got your job,” Tim said flatly. “Let me handle this, Blackwood. Jon, please. Think about what you want here. Please.”

“Jon, please don’t kill Agnes,” Georgie burst out. “She didn’t mean to, she was the one who brought you back, she was _so_ upset - please, I know she didn’t mean it.”

“Nobody’s getting hurt,” Jon promised, wanting to be offended that Georgie thought he was capable of murder, incapable of actually feeling the emotion due to Elias. “But I have to do this. I just got a message from the Beholding through a dream. We need to do the ritual.”

“Is a communication ritual bad?” Martin asked, obviously concerned. 

“Depends on whether or not you have moral qualms against _ritual sacrifice_ ,” Tim snapped. “And if you remember what happened _last time_.”

“We typically only do it once a year,” Jon said apologetically. “On All Eye’s Day.”

“Oh. That’s like, my third least favorite holiday,” Martin said. 

“The post candy sales are really good, though,” Georgie pointed out. “But yeah, in our house it’s really boring. Jon has to do Pope stuff the whole day and pick the sacrifice and then he’s in like an information coma. Then he wakes up and predicts if a volcano’s going to erupt or whatever. Speaking of which, Jon, the Prime Minister called. He wants your backing for re-election.”

“No, I hate that guy,” Jon said. “Martin, being Pope is really boring, don’t worry about it. And I am being of very sound mind when I say we have to do it.”

“What’s a Pope?” Tim asked, confused. 

“Pagan thing,” Georgie said. “Jon and I took a class in it. Honey, if you’re _really_ sure, but we at least have to wait until you’re better. And if you promise not to kill Agnes.”

“I already said nobody was getting hurt,” Jon said, exasperated. “It’s fine. Martin, can you tell Emma that she’s in charge of the Archives until I get back? Georgie, is Gerry alright?”

“He’s staying with Eric while you’re here,” Georgie said. “He’s real enthused about that, trust me.”

“Why does that kid hate his dad so much?” Martin asked. “It’s just weird.”

“Why are you such a freak?” Daisy asked. “It’s just weird.”

“Gottem!” Tim said, before high fiving Daisy. 

“It’s none of our business,” Jon said firmly, despite frequently wondering the same thing himself. It was already awkward enough that he shared custody weekends with his subordinate. “Please trust my judgement in this. I know communication rituals tend to be a bit...extreme, but this is what I have to do.”

“Jon…” Martin said quietly. 

Jon summoned a smile for him. “I’m sorry to postpone that date. When I get out, alright?”

He felt someone take his left hand and squeeze it too, and Jon squeezed it tightly back. It was large, with bigger fingers and more hair than he was used to, but he liked it a lot. It felt strong and sturdy, as if the hand could hold up the world. He wondered what they would feel like on his chest, on his legs, on his face. 

He felt Martin’s weight shift, and felt his breath close to his ear. “I’d kiss you again,” Martin whispered, “but I think Tim and Daisy would kill me.”

The incongruity of the situation startled a laugh out of Jon, and this time he really did draw his hand out of Martin’s grip and raise it up to his face. He mapped out his cheek carefully, feeling the rough stubble across soft cheeks, before carefully reaching up and kissing him on the lips. He missed his mark by a little, but it was worth it when Tim made a very strangled sound. 

“Oh, relax,” Georgie said, sounding very proud of him. “They’ve known each other for years! You’re lucky they’re not engaged already.”

“My life’s too weird,” Daisy said, leaving it ambiguous which was weirder - two men falling in love in an alternate dimension and finding each other again in the new world that one of them created, or Jon dating - “I’m going back to bed. C’mon, everyone out.”

They did leave, eventually - after Tim lectured Jon about eating right as he recuperated, after Daisy ruffled Jon’s hair, after Martin quietly pointed out all of the stuffed bears his assistants chipped in to buy and pressed one into his arms. It really was soft, with fuzzy fur, and Jon was much happier to get it instead of a pointless flower or useless card. Only Georgie stayed, as Jon suspected that she had stayed the entire time, quietly talking to nurses for him and helping him pick out food from the needlessly intricate hospital menu. 

Eventually, after hours tiredly going over treatment plans and Jon quietly filling in Georgie on what Anges had said to him, he felt his bed sag and scooched closer to the side to let Georgie climb in with him. Their legs tangled up, his bad arm carefully held to the side, her head tucked into the crook of his neck. They lay in silence for a little while and breathed. 

Finally, Jon asked the only question he could think of. “Are you happy?”

“Happy that you’re in the hospital?”

“I mean in general. Overall. Holistically.”

“Yeah, of course,” she said, without a second’s hesitation. “Why?”

“No reason.”

It was worth it. So long as she could say that, then it was worth it. 

“Are you?”

“Yes,” Jon said. “Yes, I am.”

And why shouldn’t he be? His life was perfect. 

But he couldn’t fight the guilt. The worry that everything wrong was his own fault. Feeling as if he was being punished for something, for being bad and wrong, or even for just nothing at all. Why should he be held responsible for what that other Jon did? Jon had never lived that life, had never made those decisions. Why should the other Jon’s choices - the choice to sell his soul, the choice to sell the world - affect him? Even if it was to protect him?

It felt as if he was wearing the body of a dead man. As if some other man had sacrificed himself and everything that he was so Jon could have his perfect little life. But he was still paying for the sins of that person, always trying to make up for his mistakes. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t the world usually fair? In Jon’s experience, it tended to be. 

Maybe Jon was just spoiled. In his life, across his lifespan, everybody had always been happy. Idyllic, almost. Now he was discovering that maybe things weren’t that perfect, that people like Elias or Agnes or Gertrude still lived in frustration and punishment, and he didn’t know how to cope. One bad thing had happened to Jon, and he couldn’t handle it. 

But he did handle it. That just wasn’t fair. Hadn’t Jon did the best he could with the circumstances? Hadn’t he gotten back up, went back to work, kept taking care of his family, even reached out to form new relationships? What was he doing wrong?

If this was the utopia Jon had fought and died for, shouldn’t it be perfect? Was it alright to feel guilty that it wasn’t? 

The Eye needed to speak to him, but Jon needed to speak to it too. He needed answers from it. He needed to know what he had done wrong. He needed to know what was so intrinsically wrong with him, that even a utopia wasn’t good enough. 

Maybe nothing would ever be good enough. 

That was a discomforting thought. Was he destined to feel like this forever? He had thought learning the truth of his past would ease that uncomfortable and disjointed feeling in his chest, but it didn’t help. Maybe nothing ever would. 

“Aw, dude,” Georgie said, “I know that look on your face. You gotta go back to your therapist.”

“No I don’t,” Jon denied. “There’s no look on my face.”

“Yeah there is. That’s the ‘I’m destined to be unhappy forever’ face. I know it. It’s your favorite face.” She dug a bony little finger into his cheek. “Make an appointment as soon as you’re out of here. We’re not doing this again.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

“Barker wins again!”

“You _always_ win.”

“Because I’m always right.”

And she was.

  
  
  
  
  


Some might find it impressive that Jon had a 24/7 direct line to god, and as a result was mildly omniscient. Jon found it a nice perk of the job, though admittedly not as appealing as the comfortable salary. He had joined the Institute with no aspirations or intentions of becoming Head Archivist, intending on wasting a few years as archival assistant before moving on towards a job more suiting his background and skills. Librarian, maybe. Academia. Get that PhD. 

In retrospect, it should have become obvious when Elias kept on calling him to his office for ‘special chats’ where he asked Jon a lot of leading questions about his five year plan. And when he kept on dragging Jon to networking parties and fundraisers. And by the way Gertrude hated his guts. It should have been pretty obvious that Jon wasn’t going to be leaving the Institute anytime soon, but Jon had figured that there _had_ to be somebody more qualified than him to be Head Archivist, and that he was pretty sure Gertrude couldn’t die, anyway. Really. He heard that Avatars couldn’t die of natural causes. So the position had been solidly filled, and Jon hadn’t considered himself being groomed for anything. 

In _double_ retrospect, it was no surprise that Jon hadn’t been tipped off, considering the fact that _none of this happened._ At least, he was pretty sure hit hadn’t. His memories of the other reality were still very...generalized. And just because it’s a dream, Harry, why does that mean it’s not real? What the fuck ever. 

Point is, Jon wasn’t Elias. He wasn’t in this for the power. Or fame, or prestige. He was in it for the money, and the job security, and the chance at a fulfilling and personally interesting job. Jon hadn’t woken up one day and decided to lead a cult. Like, who does? 

That wasn’t to say it was just a job to him. Jon was a true believer. This was enforced. He took his responsibility to the Beholding very seriously, and if it decided to sacrifice him to its gaping maw next week he’d say thank you. He was very scared of it, as was proper, and he worshipped the ground it didn’t walk on, as was proper. Jon was a _good_ cult leader, albeit a somewhat reclusive one. He let Elias take care of the...recruiting bits. Jon just liked recording statements, and knowing things. Who wouldn’t?

All this to say, was that Jon didn’t necessarily look forward to communication rituals.

He did them about once a year, a bit more if there was an emergency. It was the same thing each time. ALL HAIL, Jon hailed, it dumped far too much information in his head, Jon said thank you, he woke up. It wasn’t as...uncomfortably vivid, as some of his dreams recently had been. They had a very professional relationship, him and the Eye. Everybody liked it best this way. Even if he knew it was...fond of him, it never got in the way of their working relationship. 

Besides, although they kept it on the DL, these days Jon was the only one who _could_ communicate with it. The last time Elias had tried communicating directly with it the blowback had fried his brain so hard everything he said was gibberish for a week, and Gertrude refused to even try. He even heard of a Head Priest of the Eye in, like, Singapore or something, that had died in a failed communication ritual. And in Canada. And in Chad. And in - you get the idea. It was getting to the point where if any temples across the world needed to speak to it, they called Jon and told _him_ to do it. 

The Jordan one still wasn’t speaking to him, insistent that his blindness meant that he had fallen out of favor with the Eye despite all clear evidence to the contrary. The Usher Foundation was insisting that his blindness meant that he had a special connection to it and that he was specially blessed, which, wrong and weird. Jon had to admit that the whole blind prophet thing he had going on was both funny and good for his image, such as it was. There was _precedent_ , as Elias liked to remind him. It was _classical._ Jon thought it was annoying. 

Anyway, the upside was that Jon had minions, who could do annoying things like draw the array on the floor of the basement for him, and who found a good sacrifice. It was volunteer basis only, which meant that Elias was in charge of recruiting and Emma was in charge of making sure that he wasn’t blackmailing anybody into it. Unconsenting human sacrifices had been banned for decades, but, well, sometimes people got coerced into things. 

After Jon was released from the hospital, he was on enforced house arrest for another week. It was a great opportunity to hang out with Gerry, who had seemed a little stressed and overly secretive lately. Granted, that was Gerry’s default state, but it still wasn’t any easier to witness. Jon helped him write some music, played the guitar with him as they tested out how to shred properly, and made Georgie big meals for when she got home from work. It was nice. It made him think about how nice it would have been to be a stay at home dad. He wouldn’t have been happy doing it for long, but parts of it would have been nice. Jon had never been inclined towards idleness, or lack of mental exercise. 

“Don’t tell me you dragged out that old guitar,” Georgie teased, when she came home to find scattered musical instruments and amps and music sheets with Gerry’s half-written songs scattered everywhere. “I do _not_ have enough eyeliner to get the Mechanisms back together.”

Oh, no. Here it comes. Jon groaned as he strummed a few chords on the electric guitar, as Gerry gasped next to him. He heard Georgie walk over and pick up one of the instruments on the coffee table - probably the keytar, she loved that thing.

“What’s the Mechanisms? Is that your band?”

“Please don’t ask -”

“It was our college band,” Georgie said enthusiastically. “Jon was lead singer, I was lead guitarist, and we had a few of our other friends in it. See, he got really into the Protomen when he was eighteen, and wanted to put together a thematic band with rock operas, and -”

“Please stop talking -”

“It was _steampunk_.”

“You are the coolest people I have ever met in my entire life,” Gerry whispered. 

“Literally the first time somebody’s ever said that in relation to the Mechanisms, but okay,” Jon said dryly. “Don’t worry about it. You want to learn American Idiot with me, Gerry? I think I still remember the chords, but I could use a refresher.”

“Can I join in on the jam session?” Georgie asked, twanging a few notes from the keytar. “I’ve been into more electronica lately, but we can whip something up. Hopefully before Jon has to go back to work tomorrow.”

Jon perked up. “Really? I’m cleared to return?”

“Doctor called and said yep. If you take it easy on your arm, which you _can’t_ do with American Idiot,” Georgie said pointedly. Jon guilty hid his bandaged arm behind his back. “But since you’ll be busy with work, Jon, maybe Eric can take Gerry to that concert he was planning on attending this Friday? Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“Why can’t Jon take me to the concert?” Gerry asked. 

“I have to ritually sacrifice someone so I can communicate with my deity,” Jon said apologetically. “You have custody weekend with him this weekend anyway.”

“But Tim and Sasha said that they’d play pick-up basketball with me in the park this weekend!”

“You can do that next week,” Georgie said soothingly. Jon experimentally strummed the guitar again. “Besides, don’t you want to spend time with Eric?”

“No,” Gerry groused. The couch shifted next to Jon. “I’m going to my room.”

The thick thumps of Gerry’s vans echoed across the living room carpet and up the stairs, and Jon heard the distant sound of a door slamming on the floor above. He and Georgie sat in silence for a second, both of them trying to work backwards what just happened. 

“Rock paper scissors?” Georgie asked. 

Jon sighed. “Fine.”

She put down the keytar and reached out, and Jon put the guitar down next to him. These days they tended to play it on his arm, and Jon stretched it out so they could both lightly tap it three times before going on shoot. Paper was one finger, scissors were two fingers, rock was three fingers. 

“Rock, paper, scissors...shoot!”

Jon put down one finger, and Georgie put down two. She whooped, Jon sighed, and he stood up from the couch. They had to find a better parenting style than this. 

“Why do I always lose,” Jon groused. “Why don’t I just ask the Eye what you’re going to pick.”

“An easier way to win would be to pick something _other_ than paper for once,” Georgie suggested helpfully. “Go get em, tiger.”

They were not good parents. 

But they tried, and when Jon knocked on Gerry’s door and Gerry yelled that he could come in, Jon stepped inside and sat down on the foot of Gerry’s bed. 

He remembered setting up Gerry’s room for him with Georgie. He didn’t own a lot of things when they first met him, too accustomed to living life on the road, but during all of Georgie and Gerry’s interviews he talked so much about his favorite bands and music she couldn’t help but spend way too much money and get him all the merch and music stuff she could, so she could surprise him when he moved in. Jon didn’t know if it looked the same now - a twelve year old boy’s room was usually very different from a fifteen year old’s room - but he had the sense it was more similar than one would think. Gerry’s tastes hadn’t really changed. They had bought him his first guitar together as a moving-in present. 

“What is it?” Gerry said, somewhat sulkily. Like Daisy, he was more predisposed to silences, but also like her he had eventually gotten used to the fact that Jon couldn’t interpret his no doubt very interesting facial expressions. 

“I was just wondering if you wanted to talk,” Jon said. He usually did, despite everything. “If you don’t want to see Eric this weekend, he’ll understand.”

Gerry groaned softly. “He’s not that bad, I just…”

Jon waited for him to collect and arrange his thoughts. 

Finally, Gerry said, “I don’t want you to talk to the Beholding again.”

Topic change, but Jon had learned years ago that they were rarely upset over what you thought they were upset about. “Why?”

“You always get weird afterwards,” Gerry grumbled. 

Jon frowned slightly. “I don’t think so. We don’t talk that frequently.” Never mind that what they did could hardly be called talking - it was more of a pouring of information in Jon’s ears than a conversation. “I’m advanced enough that it doesn’t really impact my mind that much. How do I act weird?”

“You just do.” Gerry paused for a long second. “Forget about it.” In a much lower voice, as if he was talking to himself, he said, “You always do.”

That was alarming. But Jon knew that he didn’t get weird after he talked with the Beholding. People would tell him, usually. They were pretty good about letting him know when he was being controlled. Georgie had a real talent at sniffing it out. There wasn’t anything he was forgetting…

Besides the obvious. 

In a slow, controlled voice, Jon said, “Gerry, is there anything you haven’t been telling me?”

Gerry’s silence was incriminating. 

“Gerry.”

“Do you remember when I ran off a year back?” Gerry asked suddenly.

Jon blinked, thrown by the subject change. “Sure. Eric freaked out.”

It had happened during one of the weeks Gerry was supposed to be staying with Eric. They had all assumed that spending that amount of time with his father had stressed him out so much he had bolted. Jon knew where he was - he hadn’t left London - and that he was safe, so he had received the scolding of his life when he showed up a week later with a sheepish expression, but they hadn’t called child services or anything. Look, they didn’t pretend to be good foster parents. 

“I was looking for Jurgen Leitner.”

It took a second for Jon to place the name. “What, the bitch-ass librarian?”

“Yeah, the bitch-ass librarian.” The covers rustled, tugging slightly at Jon’s legs. “I had accidentally found one of his books in the public library, and...some stuff happened...it’s none of your business. Then I chased him down. Wanted to see if I could get a second chance at killing him, I guess. But he was just...a guy. Just this loser guy. Everybody knows what his books are dangerous and that he’s a crappy occultist, and nobody’s impressed by him. Just an old, loser guy, who never did anything important with his life but buy some dangerous books and almost get a lot of people killed. Almost. And I was like...what’s the fucking point? So I went home.” Gerry exhaled heavily. “I had to find the point again. It was weird. I had...like, three lifetimes stuffed in my head. It’s not just one miracle I’m alive, it’s, like, three. It’s not an accident I’m here. I’m here for a point. I just can’t figure out what it is. It can’t be to just…” A short pause, before Gerry quickly said, “I just waved my hand around my room. Uh. You know what I mean.”

The little speech, far longer than most things Gerry said, hit Jon over the head like a brick. He wondered when Gerry was planning on telling him that he also remembered the dead world, but - well, Gerry didn’t share a lot. And he had been uncomfortably close to becoming an Avatar of the Eye before he was put into foster care. It was still a surprise, but maybe not as much as it could have been. 

“Do you know how I became Head Archivist, Gerry?” Jon asked finally. 

“You were chosen by the Eye?”

Jon let his lips twitch into a smile. “I was looking for job openings online and saw that the Magnus Institute was hiring. I knew I wasn’t qualified, but it was such a prestigious position in the community I might as well give it a shot. I wasn’t qualified. But Elias thought I was hot, so I got hired.” He reached out and found Gerry’s knee, squeezing it tightly. “We weren’t put on this Earth for a reason. We’re born on accident, live meaningless lives, and die in obscurity. If our lives do find meaning, if we die recognized by others, then that’s the actions of ourselves, not our destiny. You were put on this Earth to be the best Gerry Keay possible. I think you’re a pretty good one, myself.”

“ _You_ put me on this Earth,” Gerry accused. 

But Jon let himself smile. “Then I would know, wouldn’t I?”

Then Jon felt arms around his shoulders, and Gerry hugged him, and Jon hugged back. Maybe he wasn’t the _worst_ foster dad in the world. 

  
  
  
  
  


They did the ritual summoning in the first floor conference room, chosen because it was the biggest conference room they had and also the only one with a tiled roof. Jon’s personal favorite was the conference room in the basement, which was small and poky and only used for their movie afternoons, but Elias had insisted on them looking ‘official’ or whatever. At least catering had set up a nice little breakfast set-up. Jon snagged himself an orange juice, only to realize too late that it had pulp in it. Vexed again. 

Elias insisted on being there, Gertrude was forced to be there by him, and all of Jon’s assistants were running around setting up the entire thing as Elias and Gertrude got in their way. After Michael had to ask Elias to get out of the way of the pain roller as he made the circle for the third time, it sounded a little like he was repressing the urge to kill his boss, so Eric took over circle creating duties and put Michael on lighting the candles. Emma was briefing the sacrifice in the hallway. Jon didn’t really know what the point of any of this was. 

So he sat down in a chair and zoned out, sipping his pulp-free orange juice and wondering who else secretly remembered the alternate universe - he had already prodded all of his assistants besides Martin, and they all seemed blissfully unaware. Maybe Georgie? But Jon knew that he was very desperate for Georgie not to remember any of it, so maybe not. 

“This is a lot.”

A screech of a chair sounded next to Jon, and Martin sat down heavily in it. Jon sipped at his juice again, scratching Tiresias behind the ears with his other hand. “It’s tradition.” Jon could not have said the word ‘tradition’ more scornfully if he had tried. “You should see it during the holidays. Ugh.”

“Tradition…” Martin said slowly, not nearly as obvious about it but just as dubious. 

“Yeah, since the 1970s or whatever. It’s adapted from ancient Mayan methods of summoning the Eye.” Jon waved a hand. “Whatever. Wake me when we actually get to my part.”

“Gertrude looks like she wishes she could join you.”

“Gertrude wishes she was hiking Machu Picchu right now, not setting this up.” Jon yawned widely, rubbing his burned arm almost unconsciously. “Don’t you have anything to do?”

“I’ve been expressly forbidden from helping,” Martin said, almost proudly. Meanwhile, Elias loudly directed Emma to get that dust _out_ of here. “Apparently I creep the sacrifice out. By the way, are we going to kill that guy? Just wondering.”

“They’ll get used to you eventually,” Jon said, as supportively as he could. “It just takes them a while to warm up to people. And no, I’m going to get his Statement and then he’ll leave. We just need a, er, live one.”

“That’s good.”

“Were you worried?” Jon frowned. “You know we don’t kill people. Usually.”

“Can you blame me?”

Before Jon could possibly follow up with that sentence, Michael came over and loudly announced how the ritual was beginning, so boss if you could please stand _here_ , and could all non-essential personnel please wait outside, _Blackwood_ , then we can finally start. 

Jon reached out a hand and Martin quickly squeezed it, so subtly that Jon doubts anyone saw, before releasing it. Jon sighed, gave Tiresias to Martin to wait with him outside, stood where Michael directed, and silently wished that he was a baker or something. 

There was no chanting. Their religion wasn’t really like that. It was almost anticlimactic to Jon, who the impressive candles and big pentagram drawn on the floor were wasted upon. Everybody left the room, so far as he could tell, except for Elias. If Elias wasn’t here than Gertrude had to do his role, but seeing as Gertrude was unaffiliated with every Entity despite _working here_ then she didn’t really have the power to do much at all. Besides, at the end of the day, it had always been Jon and Elias. Maybe it always would be. Jon wasn’t sure how he felt about that. 

He felt hands on him, straightening his blazer and tie, and Jon scowled and slapped him away. “Ask first next time.”

“Just want to make sure you’re presentable,” Elias murmured, a smile hidden in his words. “You know, Jon, for the person who implemented all of this, you sure whine an awful lot about it.”

Oh, sure, blame the guy who created the world for the world sucking. Jon fought the urge to roll his eyes. “You know, Elias, for the person who hired me, you sure complain an awful lot about me.”

“Unlike _someone_ , I am not precognitive.”

“Who? Emma?” Jon asked, faux-innocently. 

Elias sighed. “I assume you don’t need me to walk you through the procedure. If you’re _such_ an expert. I’ll give you the cues, but -”

“Oh, there’s no need,” Jon said, and let himself grin terrifyingly. “I’ll be getting a little help in that front today.”

He felt it, when it happened: when Eric, as the most senior research assistant, rang the first bell and guided the sacrifice in. Jon stood in the center of the pentagram, head turned upwards, breathing slowly through the growing pains, as Eric guided the blindfolded man in and pushed him to his knees in front of Jon. He looked scared, but some part of the man was excited too. Vibrant and thrumming with passion and piety. 

Had Jon ever believed that much? When you knew it was real, there was no need to believe. Only to know. Jon looked down at the sacrifice, some part of his fingers aching to rip the life from the man, as Elias stood silently in his position opposite Jon on the other side of the circle. 

Jon did not See these things, but he Knew them. Which was, of course, just cutting out the middleman. Jon wanted, with all of his heart, to choke the information from the Sacrifice, but it wasn’t his role. Life would kill him, and the End would draw that story to a close. Forty years from now, in a nursing home ten blocks away, this man would die. Who was Jon, to defy that knowledge?

Who was him to defy anything? Jon lived to serve. He lived to feed, like any other dumb animal. That was all humans were, biological machines, animals moving from one food source to the next. They craved shelter and protection and rest, and they found that underneath the shade of their gods. It was not a spiritual need they craved, but a physiological one. Serving your lords was as basic to the source code of their machinery as hunger and thirst. This was why man was made. 

Or why Jon made man. Had he done this? Or had it always been this way? Were those exclusionary concepts?

Elias was reciting something in a droll voice. Jon heard it, but didn’t pay attention. There were far greater things to pay attention to, when Jon reached a hand down and wrapped it around the Sacrifice’s throat. The sweat dripping down his throat pooled in the folds of Jon’s skin, and he felt the urge to lick it off. A little unsanitary. 

There was a pause in Elias’ speech, almost imperceptible, and from where she stood outside the circle Gertrude tensed. Would Jon…? Elias wouldn’t stop him, Gertrude would. Nice to know. 

Then his cue. Finally. The words burst forth from Jon’s mouth, hot on his tongue. 

“Statement of Marc Lowe, concerning the events that sentenced him to life in prison. Statement recorded directly March 21st, 2019.”

The Statement really was very good. It was a Desolation one, with lots of arson and murder and death. Really juicy. Jon ate, and ate, and ate. 

But better than that was the fear. The man was relieved to get it all out, to finally confess - nothing they took was admissible in a court of law - but he was scared too, because he had heard that sometimes they secretly killed you in these things. But hey, it meant a lot of privileges in prison, some years knocked off your life sentence, so why not? He would have a good story to tell the others, maybe sound like a big man. And it looked great on his record. Besides, he had forsaken the Desolation and converted to the Eye years ago. Wasn’t this just the kind of thing you should do?

Jon thought about his father, dead in prison. Had they ever met? No, never. But there were men out there who knew his father. He could ask. Or he could Know, Know his father’s smile that he didn’t remember, Know what landed him behind bars. But Jon didn’t want to Know. Was it stupid drug charges? Or was it something evil? Nobody alive would tell him. Nobody alive knew. 

Wasn’t that something that Jon wanted to know? Was there anything out there that Jon knew he was better off not knowing?

Distantly, almost as if it happened far away, Jon fell to his knees roughly. He was holding the Sacrifice now, both hands clasped around his face. They were both crying silently, involuntarily. Jon felt heat build up behind his useless eyes, like light, and small wounds opened on his arms and neck. Eyes still unseeing. This was the grossest part. 

No, Jon remembered, the second it happened, the grossest part was where he passed out. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Jon was somewhere else. 

He was nowhere. Maybe everywhere. He was standing again, the floor hard beneath his feet. No air circulated, and Jon smelled ozone very faintly. Overall, it was a whole lot of nothing. He was wearing the same clothes he was in reality, and his arm still hurt very faintly. 

Was he alone? He couldn’t tell. His omniscience was closed to him. But how could you see out of something you were inside? 

Okay. Jon took a deep breath, although he wasn’t sure what it was he was breathing. This was the part where the Eye dumped a lot of...something into his brain, then he woke up. Easy. Then they could all go home, and Jon could crack open that Ben & Jerry’s he had been saving, and -

DID YOU PICK ETHICALLY SOURCED ICE CREAM ON PURPOSE?

Jon screamed. 

WAIT, DON’T SCREAM. IT’S JUST ME. 

Jon screamed again. 

Something took his hand. It felt an awful lot like his own hand - same size, same shape, same everything. It had a little more scars than his own, and was a bit rougher, but it was undoubtedly his. The voice wasn’t his, but seeing as Jon didn’t know what his voice sounded like when it was _beamed directly into his brain_ that didn’t mean a lot. 

Then Jon remembered the last mystical body he had encountered that felt just like his own, and Jon jerked out of its grip. He stepped backwards, uncertain and afraid, trying desperately to remember what to do in this situation. It wasn’t as if it was common! But the Eye did say that they had to talk, so of course it would just randomly show up, but maybe not all that random, and - 

Then Jon remembered that he was being very rude, and he quickly got down on his knees. On second thought, he prostrated fully, pressing his forehead into the ground which may or may not exist. 

“Master. I - I am your loyal servant.”

Silence. Jon felt a flash of resentment that it wouldn’t even let him See what it looked like, before quashing that down very small and hiding it under his mental bed. He tried to keep his mind blank. God, this is why being in the same room with Elias was so annoying, but a thousand times worse - bad thoughts, stop it!

LIAR.

Jon’s throat froze up in fear. He stayed very still, and didn’t say anything. 

YOU’VE NEVER BEEN A LOYAL ANYTHING, the Eye - complained. _Complained?_ AND YOU’RE STILL MAD AT ME FOR TAKING YOUR EYES. WHY ARE YOU LYING TO ME?

Jon was assailed with the sensation of being caught with his hand in the cookie jar by a disapproving mother. Except, of course, he had no mother, and his Gran was rarely intellectually present enough to disapprove of him for such a thing. Was that why he tended to just do whatever he wanted with no thought as to the consequences? No forbidden cookie jars? 

“No,” Jon lied. He swallowed, just _knowing_ that the Eye was staring disapprovingly at him. “Master, you wanted to speak with me, so I came. Tell me what you desire, and I will - I will enact it?”

LIAR. YOU CARE ONLY FOR YOUR OWN AGENDAS. Jon tensed, every muscle in his body locking, but the Eye sounded more amused than anything else. It put its hand on the top of Jon’s head, and Jon forced himself to breathe normally. I KNOW YOU TOO WELL FOR THAT. JONATHAN SIMS. BUT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER - WHEN PART OF ME WAS YOU. 

“Wh - what?” Jon’s breath caught. “The monster in my body. During the Unknowing.”

YES. YOU SOLD YOUR SOUL. I ATE IT. TASTED...LIKE GRASS. NOT IN A GOOD WAY. Its hand was cool, and in a small, almost aborted motion it smoothed down Jon’s unruly cools. THAT IS WHAT I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT. RISE. THIS IS WEIRD. 

Jon stood up, the Eye’s hand lifting off his head. He didn’t bother trying to keep his gaze lowered, or any of that. The Eye was already...different from what he expected. And if it knew everything about him anyway, if it had taken up every inch and crevasse in his body, what was the point? They were one. He knew that now. 

Maybe he had always known that.

“I want my memories back,” Jon said. He clenched his fists, forcing his breathing to stay calm. You can’t show fear. That was what they wanted. “Give me them back.”

NO.

“Why?” Jon burst out, and his self-control went out the window. “To punish me? Because you own my soul and you can? You destroyed the world and gave everyone a happily ever after but me. We’re all supposed to be free of the Fear Entities, but I’m still _trapped_ by you. Me, Elias, Gertrude, Agnes - we never escaped. What did I do wrong? Why are you doing this to me?”

Silence reigned, interrupted only by Jon’s labored breathing. He swallowed the choking sensation in his throat. His cheeks burned. Why was this so embarrassing and vulnerable? Why was Jon so needy, why did he need so much? Why couldn’t Jon just be strong and brave and emotionless, always feeling the right things and making the best out of a bad situation? Why was he always so sad?

So few people got a direct line with God, Jon thought bitterly. How many people on Earth got to ask God, ‘why me?’ and get an answer. Did they know? That when they came face to face with God, that they would realize how many of their problems were their own fault?

IT WAS NOT ME WHO DESTROYED THE WORLD, the Eye said finally. IT WAS YOU. AND IT WAS YOU WHO GAVE THE HAPPY ENDINGS. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ONE, JON, AND IF YOU ARE STILL UNHAPPY, IT IS WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU DESERVED. 

It was like Jon had been punched in the gut. It was the last thing Jon ever wanted to hear - that his problems were all his fault, that there was no fix or solution. Just this. Just Jon, and the evil parts of him, at the end of the day. 

He had spent so long just desperately searching for that mystery, for that easy solution. Maybe the easy solution couldn’t be found. Maybe it was just life, day after day, meaningless and lonely. 

THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEAN, the Eye said severely. IT WAS THE NATURE OF OUR DEAL. YOU WERE ALWAYS...THE SACRIFICE. YOU SACRIFICED YOUR FREEDOM AND YOUR SOUL FOR YOUR LOVED ONES. I UNDERSTAND IT WAS NOBLE. YOU GAVE YOURSELF THE BEST PRESENT YOU COULD FOR THE FUTURE - A FRESH START. IF I WERE TO GIVE YOU THOSE MEMORIES BACK IT WOULD LOBOTOMIZE YOU. AND IT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANTED FOR YOURSELF. Its voice softened, impossibly. I UNDERSTAND YOUR DESIRE WAS A WORLD WHERE YOU COULD LIVE IN HAPPINESS WITH YOUR LOVED ONES. FREEDOM, AT THAT POINT, WAS IMPOSSIBLE. BUT HAPPINESS WAS NOT. A NEW LIFE WAS NOT. IT WOULD BE A DISSERVICE TO MY FRIEND TO TAKE THAT AWAY FROM YOU. 

“So you can’t set me free?” Jon whispered. 

I UNDERSTAND THAT I AM ALSO YOUR FRIEND. The Eye patted him on the shoulder, like an awkward parent. YOU DESIRED, IF I UNDERSTAND CORRECTLY, TO ‘KEEP AN EYE ON ME’. IF YOU WILL FORGIVE THE PUN. THE POWER OF YOUR POSITION IS NOT TO BE IGNORED. THE DESIRE OF JONATHAN SIMS WAS ALWAYS TO KEEP HIS LOVED ONES SAFE. YOU FOUND THE BEST WAY TO DO IT. EVEN IF IT DID NOT NECESSARILY MEAN YOUR OWN HAPPINESS. THAT IS THE KIND OF MAN YOU WERE. AND THE KIND OF MAN YOU ARE. 

Jon huffed self-consciously, crossing his arms. “You’re making me out to be some sort of hero. I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been selfish and bull headed and stubborn.”

WHAT ABOUT THAT IS NOT HEROIC?

Good question. 

IN DIFFICULT TIMES, HAPPINESS IS SOMETHING WE GIVE OURSELVES, the Eye said, almost hesitantly. I UNDERSTAND THAT BECAUSE OF YOU. I WOULD NOT WASTE THIS, JONATHAN SIMS. It placed a thumb on his forehead, steadying his shoulder with its other hand. LESSON LEARNED? GOOD. GO BACK TO YOUR LIFE. THEY ARE WAITING FOR YOU. DON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN AGAIN.

“Wait -”

But the sensation disappeared, and the dream dissolved, and Jon woke up lying down on the hardwood floor, face turned towards the ceiling. 

He couldn’t help it. He laughed. 

He laughed, and laughed, even as Martin and Elias crowded anxiously around him, asking what was wrong, even as Gertrude bitched him out for staying under for too long, and he couldn’t help but laugh. 

It seemed, after everything, like the point. 

  
  
  
  


“Did he really say that? That’s hilarious.”

“Sure, hilarious to _you_ ,” Martin said heatedly. His fork clinked against his glass, presumably waving it around in a flight of passion. “I was the one who had to deal with it _every day_. What email, Martin? How do I check my email, Martin? What’s my password, Martin? What’s my mother’s maiden name, Martin? As If I’m supposed to know? I had to call Elias!”

“I bet he was happy to hear from you,” Jon snorted, twirling his spaghetti with a fork and carefully eating it. “Because we all know Elias Bouchard is your biggest fan.”

“He _laughed_ at me. And then hung up!” Martin huffed, silverware clinking against his plate as he ate his risotto. “Honestly. I don’t know how we put up with him for so long. His husband was the worst boss I’ve ever had, and I’m _counting_ Gertrude.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jon said idly, shoving more spaghetti in his mouth and chewing. “I think that Elias is quite fond of me. Deep down.”

“Very deep down.”

“Lost John's Cave deep down.”

“Buried deep down.”

“Dig,” Jon intoned harshly, and they both broke into giggles. 

The restaurant was nice. The date was nicer, the first date. It was perfect, actually, perfect in a way that was incredibly scary. Two old friends, two new friends, two newer boyfriends. What could be weirder? What could be more natural?

Maybe Jon could invite Martin to Tim’s bachelor party. He could use an ally against whatever rowdiness was bound to occur. Granted, Jon was basically Tim’s only male friend, so it would just be him, Danny, and Martin...maybe it would be tolerable after all.

“Oh, you have a little something. Uh, can I?”

“Sure.”

“Great.” Martin’s chair creaked as he leaned forward, and soft fingers pressed at his linen shirt. A napkin rubbed against the cloth, carefully picking up what Jon could only guess was stray sauce. “You’re good now. Sorry for picking such a messy restaurant…”

“It’s fine. Tiresias enjoys the quiet.” Tiresias’s wagging tail beat against his leg. “He just told me so.”

The smile was evident in Martin’s voice. “You can talk to animals?”

“Oh, I can talk to anything,” Jon bluffed faux-pompously. “Gods, insects, animals, teenagers, the full works. Tremendously useful skill. Don’t know why more people don’t do it.”

“Do you need a certificate?”

“Just your A levels,” Jon said gravely, and Martin burst out laughing.

“I’m right out, then. I didn’t even get those til I was - what, twenty five? Jeez.” Martin sobered, scratching his fork on his plate. “Man. My life, objectively, is quite a mess. I’m not sure you even - jeez.”

“I understand you don’t like talking about it,” Jon said, fully aware they were probably heading into somewhat delicate territory. Water splashed, and Martin said a quiet thank you to the waiter. Jon reached out and carefully took the glass, raising it to his mouth and drinking. “Don’t feel pressured to share.”

“No, never talking about it is why everyone thinks I’m so creepy.” Martin sighed, suddenly dejected. “That’s my own fault, honestly.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. I...ah, okay. So there was the stuff with my Mum and stuff. She died when I was twenty. Probably for the best, really. I hopped around from job to job, kind of aimless...I didn’t really know what I was doing without her. I always had someone to live for, and suddenly I didn’t. I had to...it was probably good for me, you know? Learning to live for just me.” Martin’s voice grew a little more distant and reserved, as if he was remembering something long ago. “A fresh start. That’s what I really wanted, I think. A place where I could just be me. Three years ago, I just woke up and I realized - I was sick of the trajectory of my life. A fresh start was all well and good, but I wanted roots, you know? So I went back to school. I took that shitty job with Peter to pay for it, and he said a bunch of stuff, and it got totally out of hand - whatever. Bad time in my life.” Martin’s fork scraped against his plate, this time somewhat viciously. “Bastard should still be paying for my antidepressants.”

Jon was quiet. 

“Sorry. Eventually I got fed up and quit, but I know that I was a little - touched, by that. But I guess we’re all touched, you know? We’re all always bearing scars of whatever shitty things have happened to us.”

“Some of us more literally than others,” Jon half-joked. 

“Right! You know, for some of us it’s just more...public. But, you know, I think that just because bad stuff happened to us when we’re young, it’s not a death sentence. I spent so long just looking for that fresh start, I don’t think I realized that every day was a fresh start. Every day was a new day, you know? Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could even make it a good one.” Martin paused, before squeaking slightly. “Sorry, that’s so cheesy and embarrassing -”

“It’s not,” Jon said, surprisingly heatedly. “It’s not. You’re right. We’ll always be the person our pasts made us, but we can grow too. Life doesn’t have - life doesn’t have meaning except for what we give it. We can’t be perfect, so we might as well be good.”

“You’re already perfect to me,” Martin said dreamily, and Jon was shocked into a laugh, and Martin was shocked into frantic sputtering, and they existed together in the same time and place.

What a miracle. To be so perfect for each other, for two souls to meet each other again throughout every reality. Life was so full of beautiful things. 

And if Jon ‘accidentally’ smeared some more sauce on his shirt - well. Some things could remain a mystery. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you for embarking on this wild ride with me. As always, my Tumblr is theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com if you want to stop and chat. Two things:
> 
> 1) Due to unusually high server demand, AO3 isn't registering hits from unlogged in readers. So please - log in if you have an account! If you don't, leave a kudos or comment! I want to know that you guys are reading, and you guys get more fic out of it! Read and review if you enjoyed!
> 
> 2) Enjoyed this fic and the one before it? Enjoy my writing in general? Enjoy Martin in a romcom? You're in luck - I've put up the beginnings of ANOTHER story! It's a star crossed love story between Martin Blackwood and the mysterious entity known only as the Archivist - or it a horror story? You decide! Please check it out, and remember to leave kudos/comments! Thank you!

**Author's Note:**

> Second half coming...next week-ish? Stay safe, stay sane, and stay clean, everybody. Reach me at theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com if you want to chat about my top 5 favorite accessibility tools (number 3 may surprise you!)


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